Matthew in Rockland
by Positively
Summary: In whom I sit lonely, in whom I dream angels! From scholar to addict to madman to redemption: Matthew Williams' Twelve-Step Journey into the darker parts of the human soul, and his attempt to find a way back.
1. Chapter 1

**Quick PSA: **Sorry sorry sorry to those of you waiting on updates for Wanderlust and The Selfish Sickness. I've hit a block with them, and so to knock it loose I've been writing my guilty pleasure: first-person addiction&abuse h/c. Yeah, I don't know either. Also, my hang-up on incest has now manifested itself as an obsession with _Supernatural_'s Winchester boys and their six seasons of homoerotic subtext, which is a big time-eater. If you're still reading me, I applaud your patience. Loves.

**Origins: **Strongly inspired by **SaveTheRave** and her awesome **Part Right, Half Wrong, a Third Crazy. **I haven't been able to shake the image of a homeless addict Matthew from my head since I read it. Originally this was going to go along with that universe, but the plot got away from me and now they won't really work as companions. I still credit her with the original inspiration and humbly SPREAD THE LOVE.

Title comes from the third stanza of Ginsberg's "Howl." I feel guilty for how hipster that is.

**A Note on the Soundtracks: **Not mandatory, obviously; but I strongly encourage you to listen to these songs or at least read the lyrics before/while/and/or forever after you read the chapter. If you happen to think of a song that fits the atmosphere, please tell; I may not be able to use it but I'll love you forever.

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**Matthew in Rockland  
><strong>by Positively

****Warnings ****for drug use, sex abuse, and general self-destruction. Also language.

**Soundtrack for Chapter 1**: "These Days" by Nico. If a video option for "by way of the green line bus" shows up, watch it.

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* * *

><p><em>I've been out walking.<br>I don't do too much talking these days.  
>These days…<br>These days I seem to think a lot  
>About the things that I forgot to do;<br>And all the times I had the chance to._

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

The car isn't moving yet. We are stationary in this instrument of motion, and nobody is talking. Alfred stares at the dashboard, his expression somewhere between horror and self-loathing. I wait for him to speak, but he doesn't. Just starts sniffling.

I honestly don't get why he's the one crying here.

"I'm sorry," he chokes out finally, for what must be the fiftieth time in a week. I'm not entirely certain why he keeps saying it, because I've never responded. I try to imagine how on earth I might reply and come up with nothing.

"Matthew, you should have asked for help."

I wish I could just find it in myself to say something. But honest to god, nothing comes to mind. I can't summon the energy to go _looking_ for some bullshit to blather for his benefit, either. Fiddling with the air vents seems like a better way to spend my energy.

"No, god. No, I'm so sorry. I should have done more. I'm so, so sorry."

_Man_, these air vents are interesting.

Finally he seems to understand that I'm serious about the whole silence thing, and he starts the car. We drive away from the treatment center, and there's nothing but this vague sense of disappointment. Where's the feeling of relief, of a weight falling off my chest? But no, I know that that place wasn't my problem. The problem is with me, so even though I'm leaving…well, everywhere you go, there you are. I guess that realization counts as progress.

Or whatever.

He isn't turning on the music, even as we merge onto the highway, like he's planning on starting a conversation with me. Honestly, you'd think he would learn.

* * *

><p>His apartment is surprisingly neat when we arrive, though I guess he knew I was coming and would've had time to clean. It's funny that he felt the need to. Who am I to judge, after all? A dried-out washed-up junkie former-hobo honestly does not give a fuck if your couch cushions are straight and your carpet vacuumed.<p>

"So, uh, your bedroom is this way…"

He leads me down a narrow hallway to a little triangle of doorways. Two bedrooms and a bath. Great, we'll be sharing. For his sake, I hope my puking stage is mostly overwith. The room I am supposed to be sleeping in has white carpet and light blue wallpaper and beige bedcovers. An east-facing window, so I'll get to see the sunrise every morning. How picturesque. Obviously the interior design was committed by the landlord, or possibly Alfred's mother; the atmosphere is very anti-bachelor. Very light and airy and feminine. Not really Alfred's thing. There's also a writing desk and what appears to be a blank notebook. Somebody arranged the pen so it's at that strategic angle, you know the one, where it points to the notebook like it's about to jump up and start writing.

Thoughtful but ultimately pointless. All words have left me, even the written kind.

Or maybe I left them. Maybe I am beyond words.

"Right, so, I work the morning shift at a café down the street, so I get up at the ass-crack of dawn every morning but Saturday. The shift ends at noon. Usually I go out for lunch, I'm not much of a cook…"

He stands awkwardly in the doorway as I set down my suitcase. It's pretty light, since I'd pawned off most of my possessions years ago, but my arms are wasted. Everything is heavy to me now. Especially this pack of clothes from the homeless shelter, this ball and chain from a former lifestyle. I look away, but then catch sight of the tracks on my arms. Which is worse. Actually, which _is_ worse?

"I didn't think you were planning on job-hunting, at least until you got better…?"

He trails off, waiting for a response. Honestly, you'd think he would _learn._

His expression is some mix of frustration and awe. Frustration because who likes talking to himself with another person in the room? And awe because…I don't know. Maybe he's sickly fascinated with how far I've fallen. How different I am. Everybody loves a mystery, and I'm perfect for it:

1) Why would a young, intelligent, promising student drop out of the Ivy League for a life on the streets?

2) How does someone go from shy pushover wingman to tweaked-out suicidal failure in the four years since you've spoken?

3) What makes your best friend grow quieter and quieter with every passing day?

4) And when he stops talking for good, what does he think about?

Yeah, everybody loves a mystery. It's the question marks that make people want more out of you. They ask and ask until you're all figured out, and then they move on.

But I don't answer questions anymore.

* * *

><p>Dinner is actually pretty good: onion tofu burgers and crinkle-cut fries. He seems to think I'm still a vegetarian, which is sweet but naïve. At some point between the homelessness and the starving to death, you learn to get over any nobility you have or have ever thought you possessed.<p>

It's still a sweet thought. I mean, I don't like onion, but I'm not complaining. In fact, I'm not saying anything at all.

Over dinner, Alfred launches his latest attack on my silence with a barrage of apologies. For the food, for the apartment his parents are paying for, for the city's smell, for the last four years of my life. All sorts of things that are only marginally his fault. Of course, the only thing I vindictively want him to apologize for is ignored.

I close my ears against the endless parade of sorry.

He'll be begging forgiveness for hours unless I tell him to stop. But I won't give him the pleasure. See, what he needs is to feel better about what's happened, and the only person who can give that to him is me. If I say, "No, Alfred, it wasn't your fault," he'll take that as vindication. _Oh_, he'll think, _Well, Matthew doesn't blame me so I guess I can stop feeling bad_. If I shout at him-You idiot you jerk you loser you goddamn douchebag, I want you dead I hate you I hate you I hate-he'll feel bad about it for a while, then decide _Well, I guess I've received my punishment, so I can stop feeling bad_.

So I'm not giving him the closure, the _satisfaction_. I'm not saying a goddamn word.

"Matthew, you should have asked for help."

I did. I did I did I did I did. You utter bastard.

"I would have listened."

You didn't you didn't you—

"I'm your best friend."

If he keeps going like this, I swear to god I'll kill him.

Though homicide is looking more attractive with every passing minute, I sit and calmly pretend to eat my fries. Moodiness, just another withdrawal symptom. Just chemicals in the brain. I can overcome that, right?

I know without looking into a mirror that my face is a perfect poker. I don't even communicate with expression anymore.

He starts talking at me, like they usually do, but it's about living with me, the way I'm like the embodiment of silence. I like the idea of that. Being perfectly unreadable. It's calming to remember that I don't appear to care about anything. The outer become as the inner, and all that. A vain hope, but.

It's _something_ to hope for, at least.

* * *

><p>Our high school yearbook sits on the coffee table in the living room. Distractingly.<p>

Menacingly.

I'm not sure what to do about it. It's watching me, in that way you can sometimes feel a bad idea staring you down. And how ridiculous am I, that I'm frightened by this book documenting a past that doesn't even exist anymore?

I must glance at it one too many times, because Alfred picks it up and starts paging through. He beckons me closer until I'm practically in his lap. I can see the hairs at his temple stir with my breath and it hurts like hell. "Wow, to think this was only four and a half years ago…Look, here's your senior picture."

I remember that day. We got to miss third block to stage formal portraits in the gym. The girls were all lined up in front of the bathrooms, doing their makeup and combing their hair. The photo company had us drape this fake formal wear over our regular school clothes, and in a portrait it's actually pretty convincing. I took a moment to be extremely disgusted with the superficial nature of humanity and covered up my t-shirt with the jacket and bowtie when it was my turn. The picture looks nothing like me, and in fact never looked like me at any point of my life. Who is this roundfaced kid with the sweet but confident smile? Certainly not I.

These days my face is razor sharp and I don't think I've smiled in a while. Maybe I'll try it in front of the mirror, to see if it's confident or timid or lost-looking or just plain broken.

Alfred continues to flip through, pointing out himself in the football team's pictures, and mine in the Debate Team, Poetry Club, and the Literary Magazine. Then we reach the Senior Superlatives. Alfred was voted "Friendliest."

I was voted "Most Likely to Succeed."

Apparently the irony doesn't hit him, because while I'm doubled over with either silent laughter or silent sobbing, he just goes on and on about what a great picture it is and how happy I look. I want to punch him in the face.

"Hey, your parents threw all your stuff out, didn't they?"

Good question. You'd probably know better than I. Dick.

"When you move out, you can take this with you." He offers me the book like it's a gift instead of a tragedy. Or maybe it's a peace offering. I take it from him and hide it under the mattress when he's at work the next day.

_When I move out_. I hadn't really thought that far ahead, to be honest. I've been taking this a day at a time. But now that I think on it, of course I can't live here forever, mooching off the generosity of Alfred's parents. Leaving is always the easy part for me, though. I leave people and places as fast as some people change rolls of toilet paper.

But where can I go but back on the street? I have a total of twenty-five dollars in my bank account, and if my parents wouldn't even come visit me in the hospital after…well, there's no way they'll let me go back and live with them. Not that I'd really want to.

Maybe I can go become a hermit in the mountain, with nothing to do all day but scrape a living and think. Think too much, think big enough, and you'll eventually shrink to nothing. That's what I'm looking for.

A thought so big it shrinks me down to nothing.

* * *

><p>I sleep a lot these days. Like, a really ridiculous amount. Every day I have to fight my way through heavy velvet curtains in my brain just to do things like brush my teeth and put food in my mouth. My brain is working at half-speed to accommodate this atrocious drowse. Some sick part of me can't stop thinking about how much more energy I'd have if I was still doing crystal.<p>

Alfred talks sometimes. I can't always listen. Sometimes the buzzing in my brain is too much, and I have to stumble into my beige bed and close my eyes. If I can't sleep, I stare at the wallpaper—it has little ships, I notice upon closer inspection—and imagine being on a boat, just me, all alone and lost at sea. Peacefully.

During his work shift, I sleep. If I wake up early enough, I'll venture out of the apartment and observe the people on our hall:  
>-the Vargas brothers, who own the coffee shop where Alfred works and gave him his only pair of real leather shoes;<br>-Elizaveta, a doctor who once had the misfortune of meeting me in the ER;  
>-a quiet old man whose name I haven't yet learned, who paces the hall at night in a slow shuffle, and who refuses to use the perfectly operational elevator;<br>-Heracles, the next-door neighbor who smuggles stray cats into his room.

The cats howl some nights. Oh yes, little kitties, I know how you feel.

I start walking down the street to the coffee house if I wake up before noon. I'll stand in front of the glass windows and stare Alfred down, until he gets a moment and looks up and sees me. He always waves, even though it makes him look like a dumbfuck. He was so good at that in high school: playing the charming idiot card. The customers love him.

At the end of his shift he comes out the back door and takes me to lunch. Usually McDonald's, which is disgusting but whatever. He gets me the veggie wrap. I don't tell him what kind of drink, so he guesses Coke. It's funny for a few reasons that I don't mention.

* * *

><p>I have nightmares about Ivan sometimes.<p>

I don't like to think about it.

* * *

><p>"Do you need anything from the grocery store?"<p>

Honestly. Think. Learn.

"Sorry, uh…"

He is standing awkwardly in the doorway. His posture reeks of abashedly unwanted guest, but I think he's got our positions reversed. Embarrassed for him, I pretend to be somewhere else.

"You know, Matthew, this is kinda bullshit. Like, I understand if you're pissed at me and everything, but can't you even talk to help yourself? Do you, like, need shampoo or toothpaste or a razor—"

Nope. Still not allowed razors.

"—or Cheetos or syrup or _anything_?"

His posture now reeks of accusation. I miss the awkwardness.

I stare resolutely at the sailboat wallpaper, back turned towards him. Even he'll catch the hint eventually. Because, see, I don't refuse to talk just for the shits and giggles, you know?

I honestly have nothing to say for myself.

"Matthew…"

_A sailor went to sea-sea-sea  
>To see what he could see-see-see<br>But all that he could see-see-see_

"Come on, Matthew."

_Was his dumbass former best friend who can't take a hint_

He makes a sound of disgust and stomps down the hall to the front door, _stomp stomp stomp_ with those Baby-Killer leather shoes and Big Baby attitude, and slams his way out of the apartment. I take this opportunity to raid the fridge and throw out all the onions.

It's been at least three months since I've spoken a word.

Probably longer, but I don't really remember what I said or didn't say on that last long drug binge in the city. Maybe I spoke aloud to the dealers, or maybe I just used hand signs. A quick gesture—a smooth wrenching motion for _crank_, or the sign language for _H_; a couple of fingers for _two grams_, which used to last me two weeks. Got to the point where I'd do it continuously, shooting more up as soon as I came down from a high, then later all of it in one plunger. I kept buying more and more. Until I ran out of money.

Good times.

I try to hold myself accountable for these things; and though my current benefactor played his own role in my descent to rock bottom, I don't really blame him for all that much. I'm the degenerate, right? I don't resent him. I just don't want anything to do with him. Or anyone, really.

I am so bone tired of everything.

What does Alfred think he's doing, anyway? With me, I mean.

Indebtedness is a funny thing, imprecise and arbitrary. For some reason, Alfred thinks he's done something wrong, and this is his bid to fix it. Or he's got this idea about ownership, that the things of his past belong to him, and he's got the right—or the responsibility—to keep them exactly as they were. I can't decide if I resent that attitude, or if I should just be thankful that _someone's_ looking out for me. However selfish and fucked up his reasons.

And anyway, I expect this will just be another exercise in futility on his part. I'm a drifter. This is an impermanent situation, our cohabitation. I'll stick around until I've saved enough to move, maybe back to the east coast, maybe down south this time. Or maybe try to track down my brother in France. Bet he's addicted to even more drugs than I was. Am. I don't even know, I can't tell if the withdrawal is over yet or I'm just going to be exhausted and pissy for the rest of my life.

Anyway. I'd leave right now, but Alfred is sweet and innocent, and while it makes me sick to my stomach to see just how different we've gotten, I don't want to hurt him. I want him to stay a wide-eyed child for the rest of his life, if possible. I can't leave him just yet. I can't be the one to steal his dreams, to shatter his delusions.

There's no love in destruction. I've been told otherwise by a few people, but I for one wouldn't enjoy watching the light leave his eyes. It's precious to me.

We all have this tendency to value what we've lost.

* * *

><p>Alfred reminds me of when I was young. The same old set to his shoulders, the gum he chews and chewed, the football he watches and watched. It's all too similar. And I'm so different. God, it hurts. But I watch and remember, fascinated.<p>

Yes, he reminds me of when I was young.

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

"Alfred, you need to spend less time watching football and more time studying if you want to pass Calculus."

He was sitting on the porch swing with both feet planted on the wooden planks, legs set far apart in that classic boysprawl that had never really suited me. Everything was warm and still, humid in a way that suggested summer even though it was only April. "But I don't _want_ to," he whined. "I can graduate without that extra math credit, you know."

"That isn't the point."

"Exactly. There isn't a point."

The sun had gone down but its light lingered, lending an eerie sepia hue to the scene. Alfred's eyes glowed blue and his hair changed colors by the minute. Gold, auburn, fire, dark brown. My parents lived on the lake and animal sounds surrounded us; an army of cicadas chirp-buzzed in the background.

"C'mere, Matthew," he said, beckoning. This was going to be a serious conversation: normally, I was Matt or Mattie or Dude or Man or Shakes. He broke out Matthew for the big stuff.

I sat down beside him, nearly in his lap by necessity—he didn't even close his legs to make room for another person on the swing—and prepared for the pseudo-philosophical bullshit he'd taken a liking to now that we were about to Move On.

"Do you ever get the feeling that, like…we're growing up too fast?"

"A thousand years ago we'd be having a mid-life crisis right now."

It was now too dark to see his expression, but I was willing to bet he was petulant at my refusal to play along.

"No, it's like, we're a lot more sheltered than they were. Adults have got so concerned about treating us like kids, y'know, not burdening us with adult things, that they've forgotten: kids grow up because people make them. Nobody's made us grow up, so we haven't yet. We'll kind of get forced into it when we go off to college, you know?"

"Then…what you're saying is that we grow up too slow."

"No man, we grow up too—abruptly. That's what I was looking for. Like, adults don't let us worry about shit, because we're just fuckin' teenagers, until we get all the way away from them and we _have_ to worry about shit. And leaving them—it used to be a gradual process, but now we just—get—ripped away."

"It doesn't have to be like that. You can stay in touch with people. I plan to."

"Aw, even with me? You'll talk to me even after you start getting taught by former prime ministers and Nobel Prize winners?"

"All the intellectual douchebags in the world couldn't keep me from talking to you, Alfred." His grin was practically audible as he ruffled my hair and slung an arm around me. He always did love my rare moments of vulgarity. "And anyway, I was more concerned about _you _not staying in touch with _me_."

"What, at State? Naw, dude, everyone we know is going there. _Booo_ring. I'll be calling you up every weekend, desperate for some interesting information."

"You're always telling me that I'm a fount of _un_interesting information."

"I think even Hemingway will be interesting to me after a month at State. But seriously, we're staying in touch."

I was very insecure in our friendship, though I usually hid it well. Alfred had this tendency to make you feel like the most important person in the world when he was paying attention to you. He had that kind of personality: magnetic and consuming. But he also had this thing where he didn't pay attention to you for very long. This ADD thing. And it hurt like hell to be his best friend, because he treated everybody like the most important person in the world at some point in their acquaintance. I'd thought I was special, but no, that was just a gift of Alfred's. I was jealous, but what could I do? Demand he restrict his natural friendliness to only me?

Sometimes I wonder if the nature of our friendship foreshadowed the masochism that would eventually lead me down the path I took. I wonder if it was the start of this strange unstoppable drive I have to systematically destroy myself.

But that comes later.

Anyway, to this day I'm not entirely certain what made me respond so childishly to his words "we're staying in touch." I guess it was that insecurity. Maybe it was premonition.

But anyway, whatever the reason, I asked it:

"Promise?"

"I promise." He was serious again, all sincerity and intensity and Matthew-Not-Dude/Man/Shakes.

_I promise,_ he'd said.

Well.

You can imagine how _that_ turned out.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Soon, he started insisting we take a walk around the lake. When I explained to him that we were in the private property sector and that would be trespassing, he demanded midnight canoeing.

The stars were so pretty. We shared a tiny canoe and I couldn't tell whose limbs were whose but it didn't matter. At that point in my life, I had this idea of myself as a rational: jaded, wised-up, pessimistic but not to the point of melodrama. I'd done the whole Tortured Artist thing early on, and now I was going for the classier Detached Intellectual. But I remember letting go that night, just letting myself be a fucking teenager, when everything is so essential and significant and note-worthy and so, so beautiful. It felt like liberation, being able to care again. The shackles of realism had popped off. I rubbed my wrists and felt so, so free.

It sounds stupid, now that I'm _actually_ jaded and wised-up and not just playing at it. But that night I looked up at the stars and thought about infinity and my place in it, and I said some embarrassingly clichéd things about cosmic insignificance to Alfred, but he was just as young and pretentious as me and said, "Yeah," and thought everything was deep and meaningful. And I guess if we thought it meant something, it did.

But meaning is transient.

I wish I could go back to when the openness of the sky meant opportunity. When it hinted at something besides a wider world to swallow you up.

* * *

><p><em>I've stopped my dreaming.<br>I won't do too much scheming these days.  
>These days…<br>These days I sit on corner stones,  
>And count the time in quarter tones to ten.<br>Please don't confront me with my failures;  
>I had not forgotten them.<em>


	2. Chapter 2

****Matthew in Rockland  
><strong>**by Positively

**Warnings **for drug use, self-destruction, and sexual abuse.

**Notes: **Any hint of UKCan is entirely for **IlluminatedShadow**'s benefit. If you're reading this, ILU bb

**Soundtrack for Chapter 2**: "Little One" by Beck

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* * *

><p><em>Go to sleep, we're so tired now<em>

_All together in a snakepit of souls_

_New days to throw your chains away_

_Try to hang your hopes on the wind_

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

Before I know it, two weeks are up and I'm due for another session of having other people bring up the most painful parts of my existence and analyze them in excruciating detail. My biweekly reminder of why I tried to kill myself. They call this "therapy."

I'm pretty sure my therapist, Dr. Kirkland-Call-Me-Arthur, has given up on getting me to talk and now is just doing his damnedest to make sure I'm suffering too. Fair enough, I guess. If they won't join you, beat them.

See, he works at the treatment center with the thirty-day program clients like me. We had sessions every other day back when I was inpatient; now that I'm outpatient, we have a session every other week. Mostly to check up on me, see how I'm adjusting to the Real World (as opposed to what? The Fake World? Not all drugs are hallucinogens) and basically make sure I haven't relapsed. It's up to me how long I continue the outpatient sessions, by which I mean it's up to Alfred. He seems to think it's a good idea, so. Whatever. It's his money.

There's a free Twelve-Step meeting every day, but Alfred's not stupid enough to drag me to those.

In the waiting room, I see some of my buddies from Group, who'd either enrolled later than me or opted for the ninety-day inpatient program. There's Sean, who has been in and out of rehab for a couple decades and is miraculously still alive (though his mind is another story); Natalia, a crazy-eyed woman who turned to amphetamines to speed along her diet and ended up hooked on the drugs rather than beauty; and Bull, whose nickname has apparently hilarious origins that he won't disclose to anyone. Bull and I have a sort of understanding, and he winks at me when I sit down with Alfred.

"Matthew Williams?" Arthur emerges from his office to shake hands and make aggressive eye contact with Alfred. I can't figure out if they hate each other or are completely mad for each other, but now's not the time to be worried about it. Because Bull has been sidling closer to us for the past two minutes, and he uses their distraction to close the gap and discreetly press a small rectangular package into my hand. I slide it into my pocket and he slips off.

"Come on in, Matthew," Arthur says, beckoning me into his office.

Alfred follows, and Arthur looks like he's about to protest, but then they exchange a series of glances like:  
><em>Do you really think he's going to say anything to you?<br>No, but why should that mean you get to come in?  
>I can tell you a few things, at least. How he's eating, and stuff. It's legal as long as he doesn't protest. And he's not going to protest.<em>

Great, a witness to the massacre of my spirit. I love that.

"Sit down, Matthew, let me pull up a chair for Alfred here." He does so with minimal grumbling then sits behind his tall desk. It feels like a sentencing: defendant Matthew Williams, defense attorney Alfred Jones, judge and jury Arthur Kirkland.

A _massacre._

"Well, then, first things first I guess. Are you having any cravings? Any thoughts of relapse? It's harder to stay clean out there, with temptation all around. How have you been handling it?"

A beat. His dark green eyes are so encouraging, even a little hopeful. Like he thinks escaping the treatment center would magically make me want to talk again. Alfred looks uncomfortable and embarrassed, like I'm his charge who won't show off properly in front of guests.

"Are you remembering the Twelve Step Program?"

Good god, yes. I repeat it to myself whenever I need a laugh.

"You ought to stop rolling your eyes, Matthew. It's what's keeping you clean."

"Agreed," Alfred interjects. As a sponsor, it's his responsibility to make sure I'm keeping up with the program. I wonder if he remembers that I don't hold with the idea of a Higher Power, and that any encouragement to do so quickly turns me sour.

"How are you adjusting to life outside of the treatment center, Matthew? Is it easier than you thought? More difficult?"

I have no clue. As opposed to rehab? It's hard to say. Really the only measuring stick that matters now is whether it's preferable to dying on the streets. And, I mean, duh.

"Still not talking, then?" Now he directs the question at Alfred and I know I've won. The rest of the hour will be them talking about me like I'm not in the room, so I'm free to mentally leave. I'm on a sailboat, out at sea, alone. It's lovely. The breeze snaps at my clothes, rips at the little package hiding away in my pocket…

"I don't get it," Alfred is saying. "It's not even a childish 'I'm not talking to you' deal, it's like he's honestly mute. But I'm trying to help him, you know, so why can't he even try?"

Abruptly remembering that I'm the client here, Arthur turns to me and says, "I think you have a lot of resentment towards the world, Matthew. Even toward the people who are trying to help you. Am I right?"

Not really.

"And I think you don't know how to start over. I think you don't know who you are without the drugs."

_I_ think it's ridiculous that Alfred's paying two hundred dollars an hour for this bullshit.

"So you don't know what to say anymore. You're supposed to be becoming this new person, someone who is not an addict, and you don't know what to do. What to say. So you don't say anything, in case you screw it up."

My therapists are always trying to tell me why I don't talk.

"Does that sound about right?"

A downside: nobody ever knows when you refuse to dignify something with a response. If all your previous responses are said inside your head, they can't tell the difference.

He and Alfred talk about my antidepressants and whether I'm feeling suicidal—how the fuck would they know?—and essentially commiserate over not being able to get me to talk. Alfred assures Arthur that his assumptions on my mental health are perfectly sound (despite the lack of input from the patient in question); Arthur assures Alfred that our cohabitation has had a very positive impact on me (despite no measureable change in my behavior at all). A mutual exchange of comforting bullshit.

Whatever. It's their shitshow. I'm just along for the ride.

* * *

><p>Well, that was a relatively painless session. Death by hanging, rather than being skinned and drawn-and-quartered. He didn't bring up my past, or at least the assumptions he could make about my past from the medical records. That's good, because if he had asked me about STDs and turning tricks in front of Alfred, I might have died of shame on the spot.<p>

"You're really lucky that they're so tolerant over there. Because they could have refused you for admission, you know? Arthur was telling me that if you won't cooperate, they can throw you out. They don't have to accept your money."

Nope. Nobody has to do anything for me. Thing is, I never _asked_ for anyone to do this for me. They just _do_. I don't fucking get it either.

The buzzing in my head is louder than ever, as it always is after talking to Dr. Kirkland. I think I've just been conditioned to freak out after leaving his office. Pavlovian response, like salivating at a belltone. Back when I was inpatient, he came up with all these different methods to shrink my head without actually needing me to speak. I played along, because I was there to get better and he wasn't asking much. But…he has a way of getting in there and stirring things up, things that ought to be left alone. What's that saying about wild animals: don't bother them, and they won't bother you? Well, it's like that. There's a wasp in my head and it buzzes and stings and hurls itself at the walls whenever I think too hard. He's very good at bothering it.

I'm pretty sure this is not the kind of relationship one is supposed to have with one's therapist. As a person, I admire him; as a body, I'm attracted to him (in a detached, vaguely appreciative sort of way); as an entity with male genitalia, I'm terrified of him; as the man who knows my history best of anyone, I want him dead.

Well, okay, I know my own history better than he. And I've _tried_ to take my secrets to the grave. But that's how I met him in the first place.

When I get back to my bed, I remember the package Bull gave me. Taped on the outside is a note: _Stay strong, little mouse! Figured you could use some smokes, since your boyfriend told you not to buy them._

The little package is a box of Camel Lights. Not my favorite, but you work with what you get.

Yeah, Bull was out on the Smoke Porch last month when Alfred visited and politely requested that before moving in I kick my smoking habit. Y'know, along with my meth habit and heroin habit and suicide habit. "That's rough, man," Bull had told me when Alfred left. "It's hard enough giving up the illegal shit, right?"

Kirkland's got me so worked up today that I start tearing up. Bull is a _saint, _and I am a _sap, _and also a bit of an ingrate since I'm about to smoke the shit out of these cigarettes even though Alfred asked me not to. Oh well. He's put up with a lot for me, what's a little second-hand smoke between friends?

Not boyfriends, as Bull seems to think. That's got me tearing up again, but not in a warm fuzzy way.

I'm a masochist. I'll love anyone as long as it hurts me.

* * *

><p>Recovery is a strange thing. In my experience, and in the experience of those I've heard talk about it, drug addiction is a game of amnesia. It's clear enough why you're getting clean in the weeks of detox and withdrawal: with all the puking and shaking and scratching you do, it's kind of hard to forget why drugs are a bad idea. And it feels good, getting it all out of your system. Purging it. There's a certain masochistic satisfaction in the unpleasantness of detox, the mental connection of pain to the draining of impurities from the body. I imagine bulimics feel the same sense of release when they lean over a toilet.<p>

But after the withdrawal is over, you start feeling healthy again. Physically, I mean. You forget that the drugs made you feel like shit all the time. And now that you can think straight, you remember how fucked up your mind is. The drugs had shut everything down. The good parts of you, yes, but also the bad parts.

Basically, you have to decide which is more important: a strong body or a quiet brain. To any sane person, the answer is obvious. But to an addict, the answer changes from hour to hour.

It starts to seem like a really great idea to do drugs. Because, I mean, fuck this. I don't believe in that Twelve Step bullshit, and everyone tells me that without it, I'll relapse. Okay then. If that's the case, why drive myself insane even trying. You know? And anyway, the steps are always going on and on about how powerless I am against my addiction. What a convenient excuse! "It wasn't me, Alfred, who wanted to do the drugs. It's not my fault. See, I'm powerless against my addiction."

And clearly he buys into that. So why not take advantage?

I want some heroin. Like, really bad. It's not the kind of craving you're thinking of, that _I need to shoot up or I'll claw my brains out_ need, because I've felt that and lived through it, and this isn't it. It's like the difference between starving to death and just wanting to eat because you're bored.

I'm as bored as God after the seventh day. Lazing about in Alfred's apartment, eating his food, watching television. Staring at the wall. Pretending to be somewhere else. What's even the point of getting clean if this is what the "Real World" is about?

And the really truly maddening part is that it's so perfectly clear that getting high again is a good idea, when not ten minutes ago it was perfectly clear that I should never do it again.

Christ. All I ask for is a little consistency. When my own mind can't even supply it…

What's new? It's why I need the drugs in the first place.

* * *

><p>"Hey, Matthew, can I come in?"<p>

That puts me on my guard, because it seems like he's trying to trick me into talking. But he looks bashful when I get up to open the door, so I forgive him. "Hey, listen. I just want to talk. Don't look at me like that! I mean that _I_ want to talk. You know. At you. Just, about things."

He wanders over to the desk, perches on the edge of the chair. The previously untouched notebook makes a _shhhh _sound as he flips the pages. "Remember when you used to write all that poetry? And those short stories? For the lit mag. They were really good, you know." He looks over at me. I imagine what a picture I must make, leaning against the headboard of the bed. Pale, twenty pounds thinner than in high school, dull-eyed and messy-haired. Ashamed, I look away.

"And you were so good at Biology, we all thought you were gonna grow up to cure cancer or something." Okay, so it's Rub-Matthew's-Failure-in-his-Face Day. Great. "I was really proud when you got valedictorian. Like, I bragged to my parents and all my relatives that my best friend was the smartest kid in the class." Oh, how _sweet_. He was proud of me. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside now.

"You know, you're still that kid everyone believes in."

That's so ridiculous I give him a look. He shrugs at me, unfazed. "It's true, Matthew. You've made bad choices between then and now—"

No. Bad choices were made for me. I've just been living out the consequences ever since.

"—but you're still the same person. You know. Potential-ridden."

He makes it sound like a disease.

"So, I don't mean to be all Pollyanna and stuff, because I know you never fell for that in high school. And I'd imagine these days even less so. But you have plenty of options. You're smart. You could go back to school. You could major in something besides Film Studies and actually get a good job, unlike me. You could, you could…you could do any damn thing you please, so don't think for a minute that relapse is the only option."

Ooh, nail on the head. Maybe he's more perceptive than I give him credit for.

"And I know how you feel about the Twelve Steps, but as your sponsor I have a responsibility to encourage you to embrace them. So, do you admit that you are powerless over drugs and your life has become unmanageable?"

He stares expectantly, and what the hell. I nod. It's weird, but he doesn't make a huge deal about my first act of intentional communication in several months. I'm not sure if he doesn't realize it, or if he's just more considerate than I thought.

"Okay, here comes the hard part. You have to come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity. I know, I _know,_ stop looking at me like that. But I mean, your Higher Power doesn't have to be supernatural, right? It could just be nature. Biology. Knowing you, you've read all about what drugs do to you. Believe the neuroscientists who say drugs will fuck up your brain. Find out how. Show yourself how much healthier you'll be when you're clean."

But I don't mind if my brain is destroyed. It's not a place I much like anyway.

And that's the problem. I know it's _better_ to be clean; but I don't _deserve _better.

I want so badly to tell him this, maybe to get him to convince me that I'm worth health. But I haven't spoken in so long; it almost seems ridiculous to break the silence.

As if reading my mind, he says, "You're making this much harder on yourself by not talking. I don't know how you're feeling, or what you need from me. If you need reassurance. If you need a slap 'round the face. I don't know."

I meet his eyes and try to communicate: I need something to do. I need to get out of this apartment, where there is nothing but silence and my own thoughts until you return. I need a reason to want to be better.

"I know you hate faith, Matthew. But you have to have it. If not faith, then hope. Hope that you've got a chance at this."

I want desperately to ask why. But then I remember it's pointless, and Alfred is chronically cheesy and trite. Talking back to him is hardly worthwhile. This conversation doesn't deserve the air it consumes.

"Please. Just…try it out. I know you think it's stupid to pin your hopes on…well, nothing, really." Good lord, what an awful motivational speaker he would make. "But there's something worth staying here for, okay? Just give it time."

* * *

><p>Despite his best efforts, Alfred's little pep talk has me feeling proactive for the first time in a while. I decide to make us lunch for once. I pick him up at the coffee shop—it takes him a bit longer than usual, because Lovino Vargas stopped by and they get along infamously—and shake my head when he starts walking towards McDonald's.<p>

"Tired of that cheap shit, then?" he asks, but he's grinning.

There's something wrong with my face. Then it dawns: I'm smiling.

How odd.

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

"_You've reached the number of _Alfred F. Jones!_ To leave a callback number, press five." _A pause._ "Please record your message after the tone. When you have finished recording your message, hang up, or press one for more options." _Beep.

"Hey, Alfred, it's Matthew. Been a while since we talked, eh? First week has been pretty stressful for me. I wonder how you're doing. Call back soon, okay?"

* * *

><p>Yale was kind of a nightmare.<p>

Everybody was smart as or smarter than me. They talked about boarding schools like they were vacation trips, "Oh yeah, I did Westminster and Georgetown Prep, nearly got kicked out," and they talked about the research they did at Stanford over the last summer semester, and they'd read every book under the sun, and had had teachers who actually knew what they were talking about, and there were the power plays, and the competitions, and the money, god the money, diamonds and brand-name clothes and the dancing, and the drinking, and the devouring everything in sight and throwing it back up.

And they knew how to study, unlike Californian Matthew, Sunshine they called me, and I was drowning in work and terrified because I was so far from home.

I couldn't admit it to Mom, PhD or Dad, Associate Dean of Academics because they would have been ashamed to learn that I wasn't taking to university like a fish to water.

And my roommate, Ivan Braginski, was really starting to freak me out.

* * *

><p>Beep.<p>

"Hey, Alfred, it's Matthew. Did you lose your phone or something? I've got this crazy Shakespeare professor that I want to tell you about. If you call _me_ Shakes, you wouldn't believe the things this guy says about him. Having his babies and stuff. It's hilarious. Seriously, Alfred, call me back."

* * *

><p>"Hello?"<p>

"Hey, Mattie! What's up?"

"Just studying for chemistry. How have you been? How are your classes going? Are you bored out of your mind yet?"

"Aha, no, actually! I'm rushing with the Alphas! It's pretty awesome."

"A frat?"

"Yeah! There are all sorts of guys pledging with me, and most of them are really cool. And we make secret brotherhood swears and do shit for the senior members. It's not like hazing or anything, just earning our keep. You know. They buy booze and invite the coolest pledges—including me, of course—to parties. There's this one guy, this crazy Asian, name of Yong Soo…"

* * *

><p>It surprised me that Alfred would join a fraternity, but maybe it shouldn't have. He had always been such a Boy: quarterback with a killer smile, great with girls and rowdy with jocks and sweet to the rest of us. Fond of parties and friendly with booze. He wasn't into pastel shorts or popped collars-more of a band t-shirt and jeans kinda guy-but he got along with everyone.<p>

At Yale there was that upper-class Senator's-Son-type (often quite literally) who had the means and the inclination to party hard, and they weren't nearly so nice as Alfred. I didn't make friends with them. I didn't make friends with the intellectuals like I used to in high school, because the Yale class of intellectual was way beyond my league (or so I assumed). And my fellow floundering students were too busy studying to make friends. Much like myself.

I decided that the most important part of being here was class, and I would save my social needs for fall break.

* * *

><p>"Hello?"<p>

"Hey, Alfred. It's been a while, I thought I'd call you. Are you in town for fall break?"

"Naw, shit, I forgot to tell you. Me and the other Alphas are staying a week at Lake Tahoe. I'd skip out, but I already said I was game and they'd call me a pussy."

"Maybe next time?"

"Yeah, maybe!"

* * *

><p>It got to be a normal thing, to wake up in the night and find Ivan standing over me.<p>

I hadn't made any real friends, only casual acquaintances. The atmosphere was very isolating; you spent all your time studying, or you made friends and flunked out.

There was nobody I could tell.

I suppose I should have gone to a professor or the dean or something. But I figured they would just assume I was being melodramatic. I told myself that over and over and over: you're making mountains of molehills. Stop being paranoid. He'd never actually touch you, would he?

He doesn't think he could get away with it, does he?

But as time went on and I didn't tell anyone, I didn't even tell Ivan off, I was only proving that he would get away with it. I wasn't going to do anything. I wasn't going to tell anyone. I had no friends to tell. I was quiet and timid and internalizing. He got the measure of me soon enough.

I kept telling myself that if I just saw Alfred again, everything would be okay. I just needed a friend to talk to, to tell me I was being silly, to give me advice on how to deal with it. I was so used to letting Alfred deal with my problems.

* * *

><p>Beep.<p>

"Alfred? Alfred, I'm kinda freaked out. Like, my roommate's this really creepy guy—I don't know, it's hard to explain—he's not in the room that often, but when he is, it's really weird. I don't know.

"His eyes are _purple_ or something. Not that that's the point.

"I think he's on drugs, because sometimes he'll come back to the dorm and his pupils are, like, gone. I know it's really easy to find speed in New Haven, what with all the desperate students freaking around.

"Anyway. I mean, I guess it's not a big deal…but sometimes…I like, wake up and he's staring at me. Haha, I know it sounds crazy paranoid, but I'm pretty freaked out. I don't know. Just call me back, okay?

"November is really fucking cold in Connecticut."

* * *

><p>Beep.<p>

"Alfred? I'm scared."

* * *

><p>"Ah, Matvey. If I had my way, I'd live inside your screams."<p>

He sighed in a satisfied kind of way, and got up to shower. I remember staring up at the ceiling, not seeing anything, not thinking in words. There was a steady buzz-sting-crash on the sides of my brain. I leaned over the side of my bed, vomited, and wished I could just keep puking until my body disappeared. I could still feel him in me like a gun jammed down my throat, like rotten milk spilled where nobody can reach.

* * *

><p>I screamed for help.<p>

I always make sure to tell people that, when I tell them. They are imaginary, hypothetical people who want to listen to my problems and fix them.

I always have to make sure they know that I tried to fight back. That I screamed.

But nobody heard me. Nobody ever noticed me. I was invisible.

"Oh, Matvey," Ivan said, sounding almost fond. "Nobody wants to hear you screaming. Nobody cares about you but me. I will care about you, Matvey, because they won't. I'll care about you however I please, because I'm all you've got."

He'd been fucking me for a week when he first did it: grabbed my arm, told me to make a fist, took a syringe out of his pocket, and stabbed it home. I struggled a bit, but only perfunctorily. I mean, I'd given up all hope of actually getting away from him. He tugged the plunger back, adding my blood to the liquid mixture inside. Then he pushed down. "Your veins are so healthy," he'd said. A compliment, I guess.

In a few months, they would be completely collapsed.

That first high hit me like a wave, stronger than a tsunami, heavier than God. I remember staggering to the bed, blurring like a bad transmission, as this feeling spread through me. It was remarkably like peace. It wasn't exactly, "Everything's going to be okay;" no, it was more like, "Who gives a fuck whether it'll be okay." And that was exactly what I needed. Or what I thought I needed.

After that, it was almost consensual. I even approached him once or twice, when I really needed a fix. Opiate withdrawal is an absolute _bitch._

He loved it when I came to him. He liked to make me beg.

I don't like to think about it.

* * *

><p>Winter break was supposed to be a haven. I was going to see Alfred again, and my parents, and my home state of California. I was going to get a break from this endless course load, from Ivan. From the drugs.<p>

That last bit was actually a problem.

When I got off the plane, my parents noticed how thin I'd gotten. My eating habits had not been my primary concern. It took some convincing, but my mom came away believing that I was just an absent-minded academic, and I would try harder to eat next semester. I tugged at the sleeves of my sweater that covered the track marks.

Calling Alfred was not an option. How could I have ever thought otherwise? I was ashamed of what had been done to me. Things were too far gone. I didn't even know the man anymore. And he certainly couldn't know what I'd become.

He called once. I didn't pick up. He never called me back.

Good riddance.

The withdrawal was hell, and I had a hard time convincing my parents it was just the flu or food poisoning. I was perversely relieved to get back to school. To Ivan. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if it was because he paid attention to me. He didn't ignore me in favor of new friends, or believe ridiculous lies because it was easier than acknowledging that I was in trouble. He _was _trouble. He was my damnation, and therefore my salvation.

"You are beautiful to me. Like a candle. Like a glass mirror. I would like to blow you out, to shatter you into a thousand beautiful pieces. I love you so much I'd like to destroy you. And you know what? I am the only one who cares. Nobody likes you enough to try to fix you. But me?

"Me, I love you enough to break you."

I got very good at pretending to be somewhere else.

* * *

><p><em>Drown, drown; sailors run aground<em>  
><em>In a seachange nothing is safe<em>  
><em>Strange waves push us every way<em>  
><em>In a stolen boat we'll float away<em>

_Little one_

_Hold on_


	3. Chapter 3

**Warnings **for drug use, self-destruction, and abuse. This chapter is particularly bad.

**PSA on why I suck: **You guys I am so sorry for being AWOL for like a month. College and new friends and hermitting with my lovely roommate and the occasional hour of sleep are all keeping me away from writing. I'm working on The Selfish Sickness, though, and my fall break is next week so I'll actually have _time. _Crazy, right? I'm hoping to have the next chapter out by Sunday next. HOLD ME TO IT.

**Notes: **Sometimes I do think that the most moving art is found in the extremes of human nature. I mean, duh. But I don't support the "mad artist" line of using self-destruction as a tool to explore said extremes. Duh. So don't think you have to be manic or depressed or psychotic or dead inside to create things. My narrator doesn't follow that advice. Don't be like him, please.

* * *

><p><strong>Soundtrack for Chapter 3<strong>: "O Children" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

_Pass me that lovely little gun  
>My dear, my darling one<br>The cleaners are coming, one by one  
>You don't even want to let them start<em>

_They are knocking now upon your door  
>They measure the room, they know the score<br>They're mopping up the butcher's floor  
>Of your broken little hearts<em>

_Forgive us now for what we've done_  
><em>It started out as a bit of fun<em>  
><em>Here, take these before we run away<em>  
><em>The keys to the gulag<em>

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

When I was a teenager, I figured I would live to be about twenty-one. That sounded good; a nice, mature number. It was enough time to accomplish whatever Great Things were expected of me, enough time to do my sentence, so to speak, and then I could retire to nonexistence. Because life is exhausting, you know, for a child raised a certain way. Do this, do that, don't slip, don't mess up, oh dear you've screwed it up, why did you fuck it up, this is not what we expected of you, go back and do it right. You are incredible, you are amazing, you have Potential, go out and use it.

Use it use it use it.

Eventually, you know, we use it all up. We become hollow and then we die.

Today I turn twenty-two. It's pretty odd, staring down at a birthday I had no intention of ever reaching. Staring down at dozens of years I had no intention of living. And what's down this road, anyway? I've seen one before, under my feet, stretching out towards darkness and loss and emptiness—death—and I thought it was comforting to know it was there, waiting for me. But now it's so much farther away, and I don't know what's between me and it. And that's scary. Scarier than death, certainly, is the unplanned life.

Alfred sings "Happy Birthday" in that way he has, that off-tune way that I've heard at least four times, but it's stunted and awkward with the knowledge of years. Poor child, trapped in an adult world, doesn't know what to do. I was the opposite. I can't decide which is worse, though if ignorance really is bliss I think he wins.

Instead of baking me a cake, he's made pancakes and put out all sorts of insane toppings, like whipped cream, chocolate syrup, powdered sugar, sprinkles, for chrissake _sprinkles, _and of course good old maple.

He eats more than I do. I can't even finish two, but it's just so rich and the only energy I use these days is that required for the simplest motions of existence: rolling over in my sleep; holding in the screams from nightmares; the unceasing string of _i hate you i hate you i hate you_ in the back of my mind, produced by and directed at me. Exhausting yes, but burns fewer calories than you might think.

He gets kinda petulant about it, the way insecure people do when you won't eat their food. "Oh, so you didn't like it that much?"

I'm not in the mood to stroke his ego.

In retaliation, he reminisces about how much I used to eat. How he used to tease me: Maple syrup is like your crack, Mattie.

Funny guy. I'd laugh if I thought I could ever stop.

* * *

><p>Alfred comes home from work to see me organizing his movie collection. "Are you alphabetizing them? Man, that's kinda ridiculous."<p>

_No_, I am organizing them by _genre_, dammit.

"But, hey, that's still pretty nice of you. Maybe you're…what's it called when you start getting used to a situation, like, getting all domestic?"

Stockholm syndrome.

"Yeah, that's it! Nesting! You're nesting," he explains. "Getting ready to live here for an extended period of time. You're making the conditions inhabitable."

By organizing the movies? Sure, Dr. Kirkland.

He's in the mood for ice-cream, so that's dinner. I wear one of his sweaters, because the apartment's air-conditioning is over-compensating for the July heat, and he noticed me shivering and insisted. It smells like him, bright and young and clean. I remember what he said about me getting all domestic. It's just so fucking adorable, isn't it?

* * *

><p>On bad days, I feel like I've swallowed something ugly and it's got its filth inside me, it's gathered me up in its fists and won't let go. I made a mistake, I live like an apology. Like a jail sentence. I am rotten, or a spill nobody wants to clean up, or the crumbs swept under a rug. On a bad day I am used and filthy and dying slowly. Stir crazy. I can't think. I hardly move. I don't feel like doing any damn thing but hurting.<p>

The idea of redemption consumes me.

Can I be cleansed? Purged of evil? If I hurt enough, is that penance for what I am? These stains can't be indelible. There must be something I can do to get it out of me, the things I've done, the way I feel.

I mean, besides killing myself. I've tried that a couple times, and it would seem that I'm not very good at it. Can never quite get the job done.

I used to think that the trick was moving. Go to a new place, become a new person. I equated a change of scene with a change of soul; I was escaping a persona, not a place. It started when I went to high school—well, the art school that would have been ninth and tenth grade anywhere else. I only applied as a ploy to Get Out, to fulfill that elusive teenage dream of the great escape. It became my MO: say goodbye, get on a plane, arrive someplace new, act different, realize that I'm still this same fucked-up person, try again. An endless series of departures and arrivals. The latest great search for a salvation I would never find.

Now I'm back to where I started, alone with the things I have done.

* * *

><p>Today is a good day. I wake up when my alarm goes off. I take my acid reflux medication and the correct dosage of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers. The thoughts my mind generates are neither suicidal nor gruesome. I even briefly entertain notions of eating breakfast.<p>

Feeling proud of this is a little embarrassing, but I take what I can get these days.

Though July is starting to show its true colors, i.e. unbearable heat, I brave the outside world in search of a birthday present for Alfred. What could he want? He's the kind of guy who appreciates knick-knacks and whimsies over practical gifts, which is both a blessing and a curse. If I see something good for him, it will scream his name. But there are no boring-but-acceptable ideas to fall back on.

I could check a souvenir place or a curiosity shop. Union Square seems like a good bet, so I hop on a bus and sit in the middle, because the back is where I belong though I'd give anything not to. I miss it, a little, but mostly it scares me.

In the end I buy a slate clock with the money left in my bank account. You can't tell what time it is, but that's not the thing that matters. You can write on it. There's a little wooden ledge fixed to the bottom and a piece of pure white chalk.

The cashier wraps the gift in blue and silver. He seems a little unsettled when I don't respond to his polite small talk. It'll be funny in a few days.

What's the word for the opposite of motivation? Because that's how I feel after cleaning out my pathetic bank account. Floppy, strings cut, oddly at peace. Well, not really peace. Just, who gives a fuck? Not me, not today. The sun is so, so bright and it seems surreal, or maybe the opposite of surreal, like I've just woken from a years-long feverdream. Probably it's so shocking because I'm used to the diluted hazy blue of my bedroom. I feel suddenly, unmercifully awake.

"Hey, pretty boy, watch where you're going."

The brightness has blinded me. I strike down innocent passersby. Somebody ought to lock me up, again.

I look down at my feet because this is the sort of person I used to talk to, buy from, fuck for money.

"Hey, I'm talking to you. You gonna say excuse me?"

What are thugs doing on Union Square anyway? Window-shopping? Buying gifts for their dealers? Happy anniversary! Here's to x joyful years of life-threatening chemical dependency.

"Look at me, pretty boy. Now, say excuse me." He looms closer. One of those guys who's mastered the art of menace. He reminds me of one of my old repeat johns: ugly, mash-faced, but very deep blue eyes. Might call them pretty, only you stop trusting them after they watch you crawling out the door, bloody and bruised. Amused and pretty and deep blue.

"What, you a goddamn mute or something? Hey, tell me, can you scream?"

_Ah, Matvey. I should like to crawl down your throat and live inside your screams._

His eyes are the deep blue of the ocean in a storm, sun blocked by clouds, going to swallow me up and drag me down. Deeper, down past the glowing fish, so deep I lose sight of myself. His hands are on me, suffocating pressure of the too-deep sea.

Dimly, I register the sound of approaching footsteps.

"Oi, brutto figlio di puttana!"

Italian. I'm saved.

"Yeah, you. Ugly son of a bitch. Let him go." An arm comes between me and the thug, separates his hand from my shirt. Big, meaty hands. They caressed like sledgehammers, held like crushing stones. Hangman's rope, straightjacket hands.

The guy's holding them up, _don't shoot_, explaining himself. _I wasn't gonna hurt him, just trying to get him to apologize, _he's probably saying,but I can't hear for the rushing in my ears.

"You okay, Matthew?" Lovino Vargas is spinning me around to face him. He spits a few more Italian curses at the man's retreating back. I try to stop hyperventilating. "What a fucking asshole. Come on, I was just heading back to the apartment. Done shopping?"

I have the bends, nitrogen bubbles expanding in my joints, and I can't quite answer though I'd like to. I'd like to kiss this beautiful and profane Italian on his filthy mouth.

"Good. I'll ride back with you."

* * *

><p>He walks me all the way to Alfred's room, though he and his brother live at the end of the hall closer to the elevator. I'm pretty grateful, because I'm not so sure I wouldn't just fall over if he stopped supporting me.<p>

"Oh great, it's—whoa, what the hell happened to you, Matt?"

"Mishap with some cocksucking douchebag over at Union Square. You should go sit down, Matthew. I need to talk to this retard for a sec." They go out in the hall, undoubtedly to have a conference about me, but I don't care. I collapse on the couch, Alfred's present clutched to my chest, lifesaver in a stormy sea. I don't think slate floats. Fuck.

I want to thank Lovino, I don't know how, maybe telepathically; but when the door opens again, Alfred's alone.

"You, ah, look pretty shaken up." That passes without comment. "I didn't know that you went out and about while I'm at work." He sits on the couch. Instinctively, I flinch away. It's pathetic. "Maybe, I mean, you shouldn't go out alone. Arthur's told me about your PTSD, and I just—well, and there's also all kinds of things you can buy downtown—" Yeah, with what money? "—and I know it sounds like I don't trust you but I'm really just concerned. About what might happen to you."

Does he expect me to reply? Listen. Alfred. I worry enough about it without your ignorant concern piled on top. Let me worry about me. I can do it for the both of us. For the whole damn world.

"Well, it's your choice. I'm not your dad or anything. But. Will you be okay tomorrow, alone? When I go see my parents? I'm not coming back until Sunday morning. If you're still freaked out, I don't think they'll mind you tagging along."

No, they would _pretend_ to not mind. I can tell the difference. It makes things uncomfortable. So I nod, yes I'll be fine.

"Okay. Just as long as you know you're welcome. And Lovino and Feli are just down the hall if you need anything." _And the emergency numbers are by the phone and snacks are in the fridge good luck call before you go to bed brush your teeth I'll be back Sunday. _Yes, Dad.

* * *

><p>The morning he leaves, I hand him his gift. He opens it up, right in front of me, though his birthday isn't until tomorrow.<p>

"Oh, Matthew." He stares at it, in the good way, the I've-found-the-answer-to-life-in-a-lost-dead-language way. "Thank you."

We hug, and it hurts less than I thought it would.

_Happy birthday, Alfred _is written on the slate-clock in my tiny, uneven handwriting. It's ugly, but he doesn't seem to mind.

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

That academy I attended for ninth and tenth grades was like diving straight into the wreckage of ambition's worst byproducts. All of the students were aspiring artists: manic writers, suicidal poets, starving painters, tortured musicians, neurotically perfectionistic dancers. We were the lost children, kids who were never really kids, thrust into adulthood equipped with crazed determination and precious few tools. There was a sick, heady desperation in the air, the need to succeed. It was my childhood in concentrate. People who live like that, who make it their business to inhabit the extremes, who straddle the line between genius and insanity, have this certain tendency to self-destruct. They hop on the train headed straight for oblivion, because the myth is that the journey is where you find art. And the more painful it is, the truer it is.

I mean, that's mostly bullshit. But we were kids. Our gods were Ginsberg and Bukowski and Kurt Cobain. How were we supposed to know?

The alcoholism and the drug use shocked the hell out of me at first. I'd known that this sort of thing happened, but from a safe distance. I was a good kid. I didn't want to get involved in this kind of debauchery.

At first.

I got to experimenting. I ate up all that crap about how creation is born of pain and struggle and illegal things. The extremes of human experience. But I was never all that serious about it. The drug use was a hobby, and honestly I was capable of stopping anytime I wanted. No, that wasn't just denial. I was maybe chemically dependent on the alcohol and nicotine, but I only tried harder drugs a couple times. Not enough to get hooked.

I was only fifteen, but I was beginning to realize how much the world had hollowed me out, or how hollow I always secretly was underneath. And I hung on, desperate to watch and record.

My parents found out about all the rampant drug use, and though I was comparatively clean, they decided to send me back to public school. I dropped the profound artist act and became an academic.

Watch the genius, everybody. Watch him walk the tightrope, his balancing act, see him do cartwheels and flips for the crowd. Watch a young teenage boy study until three every morning, shutting away his emotions in the name of scholarship, struggling for impossible perfection. Now watch him spiral into addiction and despair. Watch him jump the tightrope, watch him shatter on the ground, watch him break open and there's nothing inside.

This is the part where I realized I didn't want to live into my adulthood.

You know, we swore we'd never be like them. Do you remember? As a child. You were seven, maybe, or ten, and you looked out at the adult world with the unshakable knowledge that you didn't want that. You swore, just like I did, that you'd never be like them. Cold. Unlaughing. Dead inside. And though I'd promised myself, here I was. Making plans to end my life before it'd even begun.

In my defense, I was tired of life. I'd been forced by my professor parents into premature cynicism. "Oh, look at our son, Matthew, isn't he precocious?" They showed me off at dinner parties, asked me to recite poetry. I had this idea that I was a mirror for them, born to reflect their greatness. And so I would do something amazing, my proof of their greatness, my justification for existing, and then I could go end it. With relief. I wasn't resentful, oh no. Maybe a bit restless that I had to wait so long; up to me, I would just end it right away, with my great deed left unaccomplished. I was exhausted. By the age of sixteen, I'd done the whole adult thing. I was ready to be _dead_.

I think I eventually got too impatient, and that's what drove me to the opiates: heroin, morphine, and all its derivatives produce a trance that is a paradoxical waking dreamless sleep. Like death. It makes things quiet while you're awake, stops the buzzing and stinging of the hornet's nest in your brain. Peace, in a nutshell. For those of us who can't find it any other way.

These days I find it a little easier. Something about hitting rock bottom—or maybe it's the process of climbing back up—has left me pretty mellow. I do a lot of thinking, but not all that much feeling. Apathy, peace; nearly the same thing.

Anyway.

My year at university is a haze of heavy, solid fear punctuated by synthetic drug-induced calms. Lots of memories of Ivan lie in wait, ambush me when I least expect. At the time, I thought I had it pretty rough, but in retrospect my struggles were only just beginning. That year with Ivan wasn't so much a journey as a boarding. Preparation. The Call to Adventure. No matter what it felt like, I wasn't in the belly of the beast yet.

That came later, and harder, and oh so much colder.

* * *

><p>"Let's go into town today, Matvey. I have a friend I'd like you to meet."<p>

His name was Gilbert and he smoked cigarettes like an art. He'd take a big deep drag and let the lungful out in small puffs, pushing with his lips so that it all went back up his nose. His smokes must have lasted forever like that, with the way he just kept on recycling it. Like a man lost in the desert drinking his own piss. It was beautiful to watch.

"He's my source," Ivan explained. "Trustworthy. Best downtown, they say."

"They surely do." His voice was sharp and a little grating, like his thin features and odd-colored eyes. We were twenty feet away at least, and muttering to boot, but he'd still heard. "Gotta have sharp ears on the street." And then he was reading my mind. Cool.

Ivan stood very close to him, and I knew they must have exchanged some money, but I didn't catch it. "Go around back, Tony'll get you the stuff." I made to follow Ivan. "Naw, Birdie, you stay here with me."

My legs got heavy and slow with fear. Living with Ivan hadn't exactly made me a trusting soul, especially not towards people he called "friends." And Ivan was jealous. Would I get in trouble for this later? Would he withhold my fix, or fuck me against the wall? But he kept walking away, didn't seem to mind that I was staying behind. I didn't trust Gilbert and his sharky smile, but he fascinated me. He was all dark promise and no guarantee, like a bad idea. Captivating and terrifying. An eighty-foot drop or a Bengal tiger.

"Why Birdie?"

"You're tall and skinny and blond. You remember Big Bird? And you're a twitchy little thing, ain't you." I didn't know how to respond, so I didn't. "But who could blame you? That Ivan's a real creep, inn'ee. I figure he isn't so much your friend as your captor."

"How'd…I mean…I don't know if I—"

"Yeah, I can tell the difference between the honest junkies just lookin' for a fix and the real sociopathic freaks. There's no shame in being an addict. That's just an unfortunate business, you know? But some people are just…" He looked up at me—it was weird because I had been under the impression that I was so much smaller than him—and he said, very earnestly, "I don't usually mess around with other guys' bitches. That's their business, yeah? But Ivan's a real creepy motherfucker. And if it ever came down between you and him, I'd choose you. I mean, I'd choose anyone but him."

"What does that mean? Choose me for what?"

But Gilbert hushed me, odd-colored eyes still locked on mine. Eye-contact has often seemed intimate to me, mostly because I'm so bad at it that I have to save up for special occasions. And so I felt it then, a connection snapping into place, like a pair of handcuffs sliding shut. This was not the last I would see of Gilbert.

The reason he was shushing me became apparent in a few seconds. "Ready to leave, Matvey?"

Later, back in our room, he gently peeled the wax paper off the ball of heroin. He dropped it into a little glass jar, a crystal clear bead and a thin layer of water. The back of his lighter crushed it into small chunks, and then he lit a flame under the jar. Waved it back and forth a few times, hello matthew, just a few short minutes and i'll be yours. The jar's contents started to bubble a bit, and then he took a couple of syringes and drew the liquid back into the chambers.

I held out my shaking hand, swallowing self-hatred and vomit.

"Ah, ah, ah." He shook his finger at me, violet eyes flashing, mouth curled in a sickening smile. "First, a question."

My blood was singing with need. "Please. Ivan."

"What did you and Gilbert talk about?"

"Nothing."

"Really?" His smile was still fixed on his face, but it seemed to sour somehow. It was more a change of aura than of expression. "He didn't say a single word?"

"He, ah, told me I look like a bird."

"That's it?"

"Yes, yeah, that was it."

"Hm." He looked down at the syringe in his hand. Then back up at me. I was paralyzed again, pinned by his eyes, nails in my hands and feet.

"You're a bad liar, Matvey."

Both. That's the answer to my question from earlier. Which of the things he would do to punish me.

* * *

><p>When I needed to think about something else, I'd draw a memory of me and Alfred over my head like a blanket. We were stupid teenagers again, him sneaking out of his house to come tap on my window and talk. Watching scary movies, falling asleep to the lights flashing on our faces and the pretty heroine's screams, waking up as each other's pillow and blanket. The gentle press and release of his chest as he breathed on my ear. That time he punched a guy in the mouth for picking on me. The hours afterward in my kitchen, him sitting on a chair, me standing before him, his legs bracketing mine as I pressed a baggie of ice to his black eye, ran my thumb across his split lip, shyly called him an idiot.<p>

I was very much in love with him and it hurt like hell.

Wasn't Alfred always calling himself a hero, a knight in shining armor? Wasn't I in need of, if anything, a savior? If anyone, wouldn't he be the one to rescue me? I guess he was kind of my castle in the sky. Unattainable, unreachable. Something to hope for without the risk of that hope being taken away by its realization. There's something beautiful and paradoxically heartening about a lost cause, a hunger more satisfying than its satiation.

Yeah, I was in love with Alfred Jones. Do I still love him? Hard to say. My perception on that kind of thing is all fucked up, so trying to work it out seems pointless.

Ivan used to tell me he loved me.

"I love you so much," he'd say as he pierced my vein with a needle. "So, so much. You are beautiful and I will break you and love all the little pieces." And then he'd fuck me against the wall, and afterwards tell me that I was more fun when I wasn't doped up. "You fight me more when you're sober. We'll have to do that more often."

So yeah. I'm never going to try to understand love ever again.

* * *

><p><em>Hey little train! We're jumping on<br>The train that goes to the Kingdom  
>We're happy, Ma, we're having fun<br>And the train ain't even left the station_

_Hey little train! Wait for me!_  
><em>I once was blind but now I see<em>  
><em>Have you left a seat for me?<em>  
><em>Is that such a stretch of the imagination?<em>

_Hey little train! Wait for me!_  
><em>I was held in chains but now I'm free<em>  
><em>I'm hanging in there, don't you see<em>  
><em>In this process of elimination<em>


	4. Chapter 4

**WARNING: ** In this chapter, Matthew recounts some of his experiences with prostitution on the street. Though it is technically consensual sex & is treated quite abstractly, it is implied to be violent. Proceed with caution.

**Soundtrack for Chapter 4**: "Needle in the Hay" by Elliott Smith

* * *

><p><em>Your hand on his arm<br>Haystack charm around your neck  
>Strung out and thin<br>Calling some friend, trying to cash some check  
>He's acting dumb<br>That's what you've come to expect  
>Needle in the hay<em>

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

I did surprisingly well in my classes, all things considered. When I came home for spring break, my parents should have been thrilled to see my grades from last semester and the scores on my midterms for this one. I guess I didn't go out much. Ivan was into more than just heroin, and speed made me very, very productive. What could I do with that energy besides sit at my desk and study? Unless I was out with Ivan in the city (rare) or in his usually-metaphorical bed (not nearly rare enough).

But using had begun to wear me down. I was really sick, a lot. I thought it was withdrawal, my tolerance for the drugs increasing so rapidly that I kept needing more and more to get high. I took more (for a price, of course. Quid pro quo with Ivan, always.) But I just got sicker. Throwing up all the time, the shakes, headaches of the kind I'll get in hell.

I started to realize what Gilbert meant about the difference between honest junkies and the sociopaths who just got high for kicks. I was clearly of the former category. I'd have done anything to stop, to not need the way I did, to become a clean human again. But I couldn't stop. Every morning I made a resolution: today's the day you turn Ivan down. Today's the day you say no to drugs.

Too little too late. It never worked.

It was exhausting, feeling like shit all the time. I forgot what it meant to _not _feel like shit. To_ not_ hate myself utterly. I forgot dignity, respect, _humanity_. It's hard to describe with words, because this was a time in my life utterly devoid of self-examination. I didn't think about what was happening to me, and I certainly didn't think in words. Basically I didn't think. Kind of necessary in this business of enthusiastic self-destruction. And it's so hard to describe the _absence_ of something, the _lack_ of humanity and dignity and self-regard. Words are intangible, but at the same time so full—full of meaning, full of a thousand different connotations and interpretations. Absence is not. Absence is naught. It is simply

.

.

.

And that is honestly the closest I can get to a description of my state of mind. Maybe if it were black and bloody as well as blank.

When I came home in early April, I was thinner than before, though I'd promised my mom to eat better. My parents could tell something was up.

"Matthew," they said. "What's wrong with you? We think you're on drugs."

Well, I wasn't exactly subtle. It was spring in California. Why else would I wear a sweater all the time?

They said, "We just want to help you."

But I just wanted to be left alone.

They didn't know what to do with a son who would not obey them. They asked me to talk, and I refused. The start of a great career, eh? My legacy of silence. They didn't understand. I used to be so obedient, so sweet, a good son. I gave it up and they stopped loving me, and that's proof right there that in your parents' minds, you are nothing but an extension of them. Their love for you is about themselves. You are not to be your own person with your own problems, because then you are a Bad Child, and they will not abide by that.

I was a little confused because my grades were great. They'd never had any other expectations or wishes for me that I knew about.

Alfred was, surprisingly enough, not at Daytona Beach or Key West or wherever-the-hell for spring break. He was in his house with his sweet mother and emotionally-distant father, and he used to complain about that and blame all his problems on his parents' passionless marriage and his father's courteous detachment. After that hellish year, it fascinated me that anybody could give a damn about things like that, could call those Issues. Not that Alfred was talking to me about them anymore.

I showed up on his doorstep once. I was going to ask for help.

For the first time in my life, I was going to ask for help.

Alfred looked at me like I was a stranger. He told me, "Matthew. You look like hell."

He told me, "C'mon, dude, it's okay. You'll get through it. Go home and get some rest."

He told me, "You'll be fine."

Tell me. What's the point of opening your mouth when nobody ever fucking listens to what you say?

And then the last shoe dropped. I went back to New Haven, and I stopped going to classes. I was failing everything, but I don't remember being aware of it. I lost myself on the streets, going into deeper and darker alleys, ignoring calls from my parents, emptying my bank account from shady ATMs, shooting up three grams at once, finding bathrooms to puke in and benches to sleep on and waking up in strange places, unable to find the door. I remember dreaming of Ivan, or maybe it really happened, I'll never know for sure; he found me in one of the alleys, buying from someone who was not Gilbert—I couldn't face Gilbert, I wanted him to respect me, I wanted some random drug dealer to respect me, and how ridiculous was that?—and Ivan saw me and chased me through the streets, and I was on speed and flying through the city, smoky as the steam from a train, cold as the heart of winter, even though it was almost summertime.

The first time I was in the hospital is a blur: beforehand I remember careening drunkenly through the streets and collapsing on a random stoop, nodding really bad. I couldn't remember the last time I'd shot up, whether it was hours or days ago, whether I needed to go buy more, not that I could have got up anyway. I remember the sky being far too bright and the day being far too warm, and I kept wishing I would die, just wishing and wishing the bright sun would vaporize me, the heat smother me. I wanted so badly to be dead.

I woke up hours or days later, shoved with the business end of a rake by the angry owner of the stoop, and maybe I asked him to kill me, please kill me, but he didn't hear. He didn't listen.

I walked to the park, thought about dismantling the jungle gym to sell as scrap metal.

And then I thought: How has it come to this?

So I did it.

I called Alfred to ask for help, the second time in my life.

"Matthew, stop, calm down. You're not making any sense. I don't know what you're talking about. Help you how? C'mon, man, what—I can't drive to Connecticut. Calm down. Have you tried calling your parents? Listen, I—I gotta go, Matthew, call your parents. I can't understand you."

"Please help me," I begged the uncomprehending phone. "Please."

The heavens didn't listen, but the dealers sure did. They helped me out. One hundred dollars, five grams of heroin, one syringe, and my broken little heart stopped.

Third time's the charm.

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

The weekend without Alfred is a little restful and a lot crazy-making. I thought the silence was bad before. Without our daily rituals of witnessing each other's existence—the sound of the toilet flushing, the snap of the refrigerator opening, the background buzz of the television—everything I do is so noisy. I think I might go mad. At night I swear the hum of kitchen appliances is louder, like Alfred's very presence had absorbed background sensory input.

I won't relapse, like he's probably afraid I will. I steal a pack of cigarettes and smoke them out on the fire escape, which is outside _his_ bedroom window, leading me to notice that his laundry bag is full. Since mine is too, I haul them both to the basement of the apartment building.

Dr. Hedervary-Call-Me-Elizaveta is down there, just pulling out her clothes from the washer. I consider backing slowly away and coming back later, but she's spotted me. "Hey, Matthew. Haven't seen you for a while. I guess that's good, right? How are things?"

This is the part where I say something snarky like _fan-fucking-tastic, I want to die and men scare the hell out of me and I can't talk_, but, well, I can't talk.

"Still a quiet one? That's fine. You've been through some things. I've a vague idea. Son of a bitch, I hate doing this," she groans. There's a wet spot on the front of her shirt from where she'd clutched the wet clothes to her chest. I'm no prude, obviously, but it's kind of weird to hear professional women curse.

As I load the washer, she makes soothing background conversation. One-way. Sometimes I wonder why they never get tired of that, and then I remember that people talk because they want to be heard. They don't want your input. They want your attention.

I am the ideal conversationalist.

"You know, ER doctors know a lot about people. More than you'd think. They say that you see a man's true nature when he's in a crisis? So even though I usually only see a patient and their family once or twice, I get a good picture."

I like Elizaveta. She isn't condescending or wheedling. She doesn't try to get me to talk like it's a game, like obnoxious tourists do to the Swiss Guard. She doesn't talk down to me like I have mental problems, the way strangers do. Though, in their defense, I probably do have mental problems.

"Hey, listen. I know you don't want to talk, and that's your business and your right. But, uh. If you ever think about pulling that stunt again—you know the one—come by and see me first. Let me knock some sense into you. I didn't stitch up that arm for nothing, you hear?"

I scratch at the inside of my wrist, and even through the baggy sleeve I can feel the raised edges of what will be a very terrible scar.

Forty-two stitches. One of the nurses said something about the answer to life.

I still haven't decided how to decode that particular cosmic joke.

* * *

><p>When Alfred gets back, there is much pointless questioning. "So did you leave the apartment? Did you get enough to eat? What did you have? How did you pass the time? Did you need to call Lovino? Did you miss me?"<p>

I refuse to react to all but the last one. That one makes me smile.

The next day is my therapy session at two-thirty. It used to be that if I'd had a big lunch, two-thirty was naptime. For obvious reasons that hasn't been a problem in recent years, but today Alfred and I treated ourselves to a delayed birthday luncheon at a dress-up restaurant downtown. I had bread and oil and salmon and dark, rich, warm chocolate cake.

It made me itchy, because the patrons there were the kinds of people I used to approach from behind at night, lead pipe pressed to their backs, Give me your money or I'll shoot.

But the food was good, and I fall into a sleepy, well-fed trance on the way to the treatment center. The bright sun slants in my eyes and the window is unyielding where I lean my head against it, but it's very comfortable. Alfred keeps the radio playing softly, some stupid country station I hate dispassionately, but to be fair I haven't told him that.

He parks and turns off the engine, of which I am distantly aware in that small part of my brain that actually gives a fuck. I keep my eyes closed in the vain hope that he'll think I'm asleep, and he'll decide to just take me home and tuck me in. It's one of those nonsensical habits you pick up as a child and never quite want to let go of: I am safer if I pretend to sleep.

"C'mon, Mattie, time to go inside."

He actually gets out, walks to the other side of the car, and, _I kid you not_, opens my door, unbuckles me, and lifts me up and out by the armpits. I am forcefully reminded of Mama Cats who are Tired of This Shit and carry their babies around by the scruffs of their necks.

I feel like I ought to put up a fuss of some kind, but I can't be bothered. In my mind's eye, I go limp in his mouth.

* * *

><p>Dr. Kirkland is an exceptional therapist, and only when I am feeling particularly moody and petulant do I deny it. His interpersonal intelligence is eerie-he can read anyone like a book-but he isn't exactly sympathetic. He won't take any bullshit, and chances are, if you're here? then you're full of it.<p>

"Matthew. You're looking tired today."

"He's had an eventful week. My boss saw some skinhead hustling him downtown…" I think you're looking for _hassling_, dumbass. "Thought you might should talk to him about that." He tries to catch my eye, maybe to give me an apologetic look, _aw shucks, sorry. _Not today, motherfucker. I won't even acknowledge your contrition. Story of my life.

"Alright, Matthew, come back with me."

In his office, I am supposed to feel "safe," because people who feel safe are apparently more talkative. But I think the entire concept is ridiculous. Therapy is where you go to "work through" all the ways you've fucked up, and whatever made you so much of a fuck-up in the first place. There's no safety in that. Some days you've got a bird's-eye view of the wreckage of your life, and it's the saddest thing you ever saw; other days you're in the trenches, grappling with very real and present terror and confusion and broken things, you're shooting at an enemy and he turns out to be you. It's a war.

"We'll start small. I assume you haven't relapsed, or else Alfred would have more important news to give me?"

I shrug a little. It's one of those cases where nodding can be taken two different ways, and the asker will interpret it however they wish or however they fear.

"Good, I think. Well, do you still not feel like talking?"

Obviously not. But I'm in a generous mood so I nod. Again, could be interpreted in a couple ways, but I figure that if Dr. Kirkland was smart enough to get a medical degree then he's smart enough to know what I mean.

People should seriously start asking straight yes-or-no questions. Think of the mutes.

"Okay, that's fine. How about we do some memory meditating?"

Dr. Kirkland's meditation is, unfortunately, not a circle of oms and ahs and breathing in the earth. He does some hardcore Jedi mind-shit—he puts his patients in a state of relaxation and takes them on a guided journey into their memories. It's the kind of hypnosis they sometimes use on cop shows to get witnesses to remember more details.

This, as you might imagine, is my least favorite thing in the world.

"Okay, feet on the floor, uncross your arms. That's the ticket. Now," his voice is going all low and soothing. "Breathe in slowly. Hold that breath to the count of four. Exhale fully. Just focus on your breathing, in with fresh cool air, out with hot tense air. Now, I want you to focus on your right arm. Relax that arm, let go of all the muscles holding it in place, just relax that arm…" He goes on sounding like an idiot for a while, until I start slipping under.

"Now, I want you to think back to five months ago. Five months ago, can you do that for me? It's summertime. You're wearing t-shirts and jeans, maybe sandals. I want you to try to feel the clothes you're wearing, can you do that for me? There's a warm breeze on your arms and your feet, warm dry San Francisco air. You're out on a street corner. You can smell salty air. What else can you smell?"

Smoke. Dirty people.

"I want you to catch hold of that smell, concentrate on it. Where do you taste it? In your mouth, your throat, the bottom of your lungs?"

It sits in the back of my throat. I start to cough.

"Good, now listen. Listen to the sounds on the street…"

I'm still coughing on the smoke, because this guy Raymond had been blowing it in my face as some kind of joke. Maybe he thought it was sexy.

Raymond was my old pimp.

Cars don't rush by here, they crawl. You can hear the gravel crunch under the tires, real slow and predatory. They're not going some place, they're looking for some one. They're window shopping.

Raymond's here because I'd been getting a couple of violent johns for a week, and it got so bad I complained. Well, Felix complained for me. I didn't give a fuck as long as I got my money.

"What do you see? Do you see any people? Any cars? Concentrate on them. Remember every detail…"

The car that pulls up is a shiny black Mercedes, tinted windows, incongruously dirty tires. The base pounds in the air. This guy will pay very well. A sick sort of anticipation jumps in my gut, one that I felt every time I was about to get some good business, one that still makes me gag when I think on it.

"Easy there. Now, I don't want you to come out of it, just nod or shake your head. Are you doing drugs?" Shake. "Turning tricks?" Nod. "Ah. Okay. I want you to focus on what you're feeling, physically. Where are his hands?"

My arms. My upper arms. He's holding me down—oh, god, I can't move—now my back, his flesh is warm across my back, suffocating—"Okay, breathe deep, Matthew, let's stop thinking about the physical. Okay? What do you feel emotionally? Fear, anger, sadness, guilt…" All of it. But mostly shame. I will never be free of it, it suffocates me, it's scrubbed _into_ me—

"Tell me where you feel that emotion. In your head? Your chest? Your gut? Try to find the physical source of that feeling." It's in my gut, a heavy stone sinking lower. It twists—good god. "Okay, have you found the source? I want you to concentrate there, give that feeling all your attention—"

The more I think about it, the less manageable it gets. I feel so full of sewage that I'd only have to be pushed a bit to slop over at the mouth. It's the kind of feeling that will swallow you whole, incessant, ceaseless, inexhaustible. This is where I store the shame of every horrible, disgusting, wrong, immoral thing I've ever done. My typical coping mechanism these days—dry, apathetic cynicism—is paralyzed. I look at what I've done, everything I've created in the past four years, and it is not good.

It suffocates me. It's weighing me down, it lies on top of me, like that man over my back, flesh sweaty and warm and my fault, everything that happened my fault—

I jerk back so hard that my chair loses balance and tips over completely. Dr. Kirkland is making noises, getting up from his chair and apologizing, coming closer, and then his hands are on my upper arms and _that is not okay, it's not, please stop touching me, I don't want you to do that, you don't want to do that. I am used and ugly, swept under the rug-_

"Are you okay, Matthew?"

_Find me a boat on the sea, escape, water wind salt peace alone—_

"I want to help, do you understand? I'm trying to help you stand up. Okay? You're safe."

_There's that word again, _safe_. _

"I'm trying to help. Do you understand? I'm not going to hurt you."

And then suddenly that seems very profound, that he's not touching me like the others, that his touch is meant to help, that it's not _selfish_, that he's not after something I have, he just _wants to help_.

"Take deep breaths, Matthew. Look around at my office. That carpet, under your hands? I want you to concentrate." His hands are off my arms, and I can think clearly again. "Concentrate on the way it's scratching your hands." The room slowly comes into focus around me. His face is so close. I'm going to be honest: it's really hard not to laugh when you're at eyebrow level with Arthur Kirkland.

Even hysterical laughter feels good. Like that sticky but refreshed feeling you get after a good cry.

* * *

><p>When our session finishes, I'm still pretty freaked out. Alfred notices.<p>

"Hey, what'd you do to him, limey? He's shaking like a leaf." He goes to put an arm around me but I dodge swiftly, a cat slinking away from affection.

"Doctor-patient confidentiality. I'm afraid I can't talk about it without Matthew's permission."

He looks at me and I shrug.

That evening, I start throwing up after dinner. Memories are always near the surface after a session, but today I am particularly certain that I'll never be whole again. It eats at my gut. I suppose my body's trying to getting the filth out. But it won't work. It's ingrained in my soul. Midway through the episode, Alfred comes into the bathroom and crouches down beside me. I guess I'm pretty touched that he's more concerned about my health than he is grossed out by my puking. He asks to check for fever, but we both know it's PTSD, not the flu.

His wrist is soft and gentle on my forehead. I try my hardest not to swoon, because seriously. I've used up my pathetic-ness quota for the night, thanks.

I'm honestly too exhausted to get up from my position in front of the toilet. Alfred collapses next to me, kind of leaning against my side even though Dr. Kirkland warned him away from physical contact. I don't mind as much as people seem to think I should.

"Do you want to watch a movie?"

I shake my head.

"Good, I'm beat." Neither of us gets up for a couple hours. We just sit there, leaning into each other's warmth, not saying a word. Times like these I wish I talked. It would make silence mean so much more.

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

I woke up in a narrow white bed, hooked up to machines, catheter shoved up my dick. It stung like a motherfucker and I tried to tell that to a nurse, but there was a tube down my throat.

"Ah. He's awake," the nurse said to a colleague. I tried to turn my head to see, but it was held in place by exhaustion. He wandered into my field of view, another nurse, and they started talking about me like I wasn't there.

"Homeless?"

"Definitely."

"Look at the tracks."

"Saw them."

"No way he's got insurance."

"Maybe he can sign an AMA form? Discharge Against Medical Advice?"

"Yeah, that's how we usually handle it."

"That's sad. He's a danger to himself if I ever saw one."

I was trying to talk, but the tube was still down my throat. I started gagging and coughing, and that son of a bitch took his time getting it unhooked.

"My parents," I rasped. "I'm on their insurance plan."

"You got a card?"

"In my wallet." My clothes were across the room, so the female nurse went fishing around in my pocket.

"Here we go. I'll go get the paperwork for you."

In the meantime, I asked the male nurse if he would take the catheter out, but he refused for reasons obscure.

The lady nurse came back, explaining that the card wouldn't work.

"But…they gave that to me not eight months ago. Could it have expired?"

The nurses exchanged pitying looks. "It's more likely that your parents took you off their insurance plan. Try calling them."

My father picked up the phone.

"No, I don't have a son." His voice shook, but that didn't change the words, the total finality in his voice. Condemning, disavowing. _I have no son. He who disobeys, he who makes mistakes, is no son of mine._

Alfred never picked up the phone.

* * *

><p>Here's the thing about living for other people: when they disown you, things get a little confusing.<p>

I felt like my star had imploded, my center of gravity just vanished, sent me spinning off way far fucking out into space. Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do? I was at Yale for my parents. Okay, dropped out, check. I was keeping myself alive for my parents. Okay, fuck that, check. I was trying to be okay for Alfred. Okay. Well. I didn't have to be okay anymore.

I was living for them. When they let go of me, what was left for me to do but let go?

And I stepped out into the street, having just signed a form that basically said I understood it was monumentally stupid to leave the hospital and I was going to do it anyway. And I wandered deep into the streets, starting to shake from withdrawal.

No, I told myself. I should be better. I should get okay again.

But why? Here is a boy who's been smashed open and found empty inside, strings cut, lost without a purpose. See the boy, the hollow boy, search for meaning and come up with nothing.

"Hey, you wanna score?"

And it's coming, someone help him, everything is coming loose, he is going to let go and make the biggest fucking mistake in his life and why isn't anyone helping him? You, there, why aren't you watching him? Why is this boy destroying his soul without even the benefit of an audience to make it mean something? Why must he quietly, silently stand on the edge and slowly tip over without anyone even trying to reach for him? Why is this happening?

Sorry. It's just hard to look back and not try to warn him. The boy that I was.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, he said yes.

* * *

><p>Months pass and this boy is swimming under deeper and deeper, relishing in the uncertainty, the sheer audacity of such an action, throwing caution to the winds, drowning it with stones; he is curious at how far he can go, how far his boundaries reach, what will happen when he breaks through them. And the blue salty darkness closes over his head, and he doesn't know which way is up, and he thinks,<p>

Wait, I didn't mean it, I didn't want this, I take it back,

but it is too late.

And isn't it wonderful, that he can just say_ I am lost _and be done with it? What a relief, to have nothing left to lose. What incredible freedom. A man is never so free as when he carries himself to his own gallows-ground.

* * *

><p>"Hey, Birdie. C'mon, Birdie, wake up."<p>

I stirred a little. My whole body was buzzing, every limb and extremity fallen asleep. It was torture and the inside of my mouth tasted like rotten milk.

"Shit, man, I'm not taking you to the hospital if you've OD'd. C'mon, Birdie."

My eyes cracked open. "Gilbert?"

* * *

><p><em>Now on the bus<br>Nearly touching this dirty retreat  
>Falling out<br>6th and Powell, a dead sweat in my teeth  
>Gonna walk walk walk<br>Four more blocks, plus the one in my brain  
>Down downstairs<br>to the man, he's gonna make it all okay_

_I can't beat myself  
>I can't beat myself<br>And I don't want to talk  
>I'm taking the cure<br>So I can be quiet wherever I want  
>So leave me alone<br>You ought to be proud that I'm getting good marks  
>Needle in the hay<em>

* * *

><p><strong>Notes: <strong>Forty-two is the answer to life according to Douglas Adam's _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. _It's kind of a meme for old people and cool young 'uns. Dr. Kirkland's meditation techniques are a mix of generic memory recovery and Somatic Experiencing, which I first learned about through the drug-use memoir _Tweak._


	5. Chapter 5

**Warnings **for drug use, self-destruction, and abuse.

**Notes: **Hints of past PruCan, hints of burgeoning AmeCan FINALLY.

**Sountrack for Chapter 5: **"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Bob Dylan

* * *

><p><em>You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last<br>But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast  
>Yonder stands your orphan with his gun<br>Crying like a fire in the sun  
>Look out the saints are comin' through<br>And it's all over now, Baby Blue_

* * *

><p><strong>Then:<strong>

"Gil?" It was shocking that my voice worked. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had something to drink.

"Oh, you remember me. How flattering." He smirked some, and then it became his version of a genuine smile, that cocky flash of teeth. "Let's get you up. Jesus, you smell. Let's go to my place, okay? A shower sound good? Maybe some food? Oh god, definitely some food," he rambled, hoisting me up by the armpits. "You can't weight more than one-fifteen. Which is really fucking scary, 'cause you're what, six-one? I know drugs are nice, kid, but you can't live off them alone. You gotta eat something sometimes."

His words didn't really process, but it was nice to hear a voice directed at me for once. One that didn't shout "get a job," or "fuckin' freeloader," or "no, honey, stay away from that man."

"God, how are you even alive? It's October, did you know that? You're wearing a t-shirt like it's still June or something."

I collapsed on his couch and slept for days. Took a shower. Ate a little. Begged for a gram, just a gram, half a gram? Anything? But he shook his head at me. "No, I want you clean. _You_ want you clean."

"No, god no, I really don't."

But he was gone during the day, out selling I guess, and he never brought his business home. "I'm in a partnership, see. The other guy keeps the goods. I handle the money. First rule of dealing drugs? Never do them yourself."

His altruism bewildered me. "Why are you doing this?" I asked him every day.

"Remember how I told you I would choose you over Ivan in a heartbeat?" He stared at me, crazy reddish eyes sinking right into mine. He acknowledged me directly, first person to do that in months, and it reminded me of Alfred. Only then it was unsettling as well as intoxicating, because I had become something ugly. I didn't want to be stared at.

"He's been asking after you. He's been keeping tabs. Know how? Through the dealers. He's known exactly where you were since he got back from summer vacation. I imagine he's going to—whoa, hey, calm your tits. I won't let him find you, okay? I'm gonna help you get clean, and maybe move away from here. Okay? I won't tell him where you are. Okay, Matthew?"

* * *

><p>Gilbert was in the living room and I was in hell.<p>

"Yeah, Tony, I know. I _know_, man. No, stop talking like—but you can't just tell the mules—"

I tried to keep track of the conversation between transports of agony. Who knew that my stomach could _hold_ this much? "C'mon, Tony, not here. Your place. No, this is not about the kid, it's about them bringing the goods around—yeah, there's a _reason_ I don't—"

And my head. That was worse than the puking.

"You know how hard it is for me."

And the shaking, the weakness, the horrible suspicion that I would never be in complete control of my muscles ever again. The fuzzy-mindedness of exhaustion, the hazy detachment of starvation.

Gilbert finished his phone conversation with a clipped "fine" and came over to put a hand on my back. "It'll get better in a few days. Promise. Listen, I'm not going to keep doing this for you forever. You're going to have to start trying harder soon."

This was the third time I'd run away from his apartment on a drugs binge. This one had been mercifully shorter than the last two; I don't think I got around to eating out of dumpsters. Gilbert was a fucking _hawk_ when it came to finding me, even when I was trying to disguise myself from the dealers. Even when I thought I was buying the drugs secondhand, thirdhand, as far removed from the Albinos (the nickname for dealers associated with Gilbert) as I could get. In retrospect, he was probably more powerful in the New Haven Underworld than I suspected at the time. I wonder if he had official tabs on me, told all his contacts to tell their contacts to tell their contacts to keep an eye out for a tall skinny white kid with too much hair. "You shouldn't have given me as many chances as you already have."

"Don't be ridiculous." All in all, not a very convincing argument. "Listen. Quitting is hard, okay? I know. Birdie, I know. Anybody with sense would know that you need more than three chances to get it right."

"My parents didn't even give me the one."

"Yeah? Well fuck 'em. C'mon, you should get in bed. I'll get you a bowl. I'm about to have some less-than-savory company and I suggest you not be present."

* * *

><p>Gilbert's "unsavory company" was not particularly subtle. Granted, the walls were thin. But I'd been on the street for half a year, and I knew that this guy's life expectancy was pretty fucking short unless somebody taught him some volume control. "I swear, man, I ain't playin'. He gonna hook you up good. He real good at finding contacts. You ever seen a hunting dog when it catches a scent?"<p>

"Yeah, and I seen one shit on my living room floor, too. What's to say he ain't gonna cheat us?"

Gilbert had affected his streetspeak, using the vernacular of his customers and the mules he needed to keep things running smoothly. "I want them to know I was born down here. I went to school, yeah, learned how to speak proper, but grammar don't mean shit around here. People on the street don't trust a kid who grew up knowing grammar rules," he used to tell me. Trust was apparently a big deal to him: he went out on the streets with the sellers who worked for him from time to time. Showed his face, his predatory smile. He wasn't no fool, and he wasn't no faceless money bag neither. After looking into his eyes, after realizing just how involved he was, just how closely he watched his operations, you'd have to be suicidal to try and double-cross him.

I still don't really know how drug operations work behind closed doors. I was only ever involved in the street business, buying from the dealers who worked for people like Gilbert. He never told me what he was doing, and he always did his best to keep business out of his apartment. Some evenings when we were home together he'd peruse his little blue ledger, holding a cigar and wearing reading glasses. (He was a goddamn sophisticate.) But he never let me look at the ledger. Never told me how he got his shipment of heroin and cocaine. I never really asked. The curiosity only strikes me later.

They talked shop for a while, and then this contact said, "Yo, so where's that bitch of yours that's always causin' so much trouble? Some of Matthias' men are saying that creepy-ass motherfucker Braginsky ain't buying from your Albinos no more because you keepin' him locked up good."

"He ain't _locked up._ When he's with me, he's with me by choice." Well, that was mostly true. Sometimes Gilbert had to be a little forceful to remind me that I'd rather be clean and off the streets. "Wouldn't you hide if Ivan Braginsky wanted a piece of your ass?"

"What is up with you white guys' obsession with that punk? He too skinny anyways. Never says a word. I sold to him once, quiet motherfucker."

"Still waters run deep."

"Alright whatever, Shakespeare."

At this point in their conversation, I stopped listening to concentrate on vomiting and then thinking up a way to dispose of it so Gilbert wouldn't see the blood.

* * *

><p>"I was a junkie, you know," he mentioned one night. It was midwinter, almost Christmas, and he'd just found me sleeping in the inner tube at the Hallock Street playground. I was trying to concentrate on his voice and not on the memories that always spilled through when I was kinda high but not high enough.<p>

"Just another kid selling for a kingpin out on the street. Got so damn bored I tried the product myself. It's how I learned the most important rules of dealing: don't sample your own product, don't let your workers stop fearing your wrath, and don't trust anyone but an honest junkie. 'Cuz back when I was a junkie? Sure I'd do anything for a fix. But that's_ it_, man. You'd do anything, just for that fix. You don't have any ulterior motives, you aren't looking to unseat anybody or get anybody thrown in jail. You ain't got no _politics_. Addicts, them's the people on the street you can always predict."

He rubbed feeling back into my fingers, my arms. Wrapped me in soft, downy blankets that you'd never expect a guy like him to own.

"I tried that twelve-step bullshit. I didn't really get it. They kept telling me it was out of my hands. So I kept waiting and waiting and nothing ever fucking got better, and then I realized it's because that shit _is_ in your hands, know what I mean? If you sit around waiting for yourself to stop doing drugs, nothing's ever gonna happen. You gotta seize the day, know what I mean?"

His business cell started ringing. "Fuck. What is it, Tony? Better be good, you know how I—well, shit. Who's been doing that? …Are you fucking kidding me? Last time I saw that motherfucker, no joke, last _fucking_ time, I told him he better stop dropping bodies or else he'd get some attention and then I'd get—hang on a sec, Tony…" Putting a hand over the mouthpiece, he whispered, "I'm going to go meet up with him, okay? You gonna be fine for tonight?"

I did my best to nod. "Good. Alright, Tony, I'm on my way to R-4. _R-4_, moron, you don't talk about shit this serious on the phone."

The body-dropper they were talking about ended up getting his body dropped a couple nights later.

To this day I cannot reconcile the man who fed me soup and wrapped me in his blankets with that cold-blooded kingpin of New Haven. I wonder if he's still dealing. I wonder if his empire has expanded, how much turf his Albinos own, how much money he makes in a week. That money comes from sadists like Ivan, sure, but most of it is from helpless people like me, who would do anything not to give it.

Well, anything but quit using.

* * *

><p>"Birdie, come sit down for a minute."<p>

Gilbert was sitting in his office, rubbing his sinuses. "You okay?" I asked. He rolled his neck with a pained sound, so I came around behind his desk and started rubbing his shoulders.

"Heavy is the head that wears the crown," he sighed. "Go sit down. You're sweet, but. You're gonna want to sit down for this." I cautiously obeyed. "Alright, lemme break this fast." He took a breath and met my eyes. "Ivan Braginsky don't give up easy. I've heard from some of Matthias' men that he's past smitten and right on into wrathful. He's the type to want you dead rather than cheating, get me? So—Matthew, are you listening to me?"

No, I wasn't. I was busy hyperventilating into my hoodie sleeve.

"Matthew, Birdie, come on. I'm not going to let him hurt you. Okay? I'm going to give you some money. I'm going to put you on a plane to California. Okay? And I won't let him hurt you. But can you promise me one thing? When I give you this money, do you promise not to use it on drugs? Will you use it to get an apartment, or try to get into contact with your parents, old friends?" I didn't have either of those, though. "Go back to California, get healthy, never talk to anybody from New Haven ever again."

That got my attention. "Not even you?"

"Honestly? It would be dangerous for both of us. And I don't keep the same number for more than a couple weeks, you know that."

What was happening?

"Matthew, it's better if we just part ways completely here."

Was I being thrown away again?

"Come here, Birdie," he said, patting his lap. In the back of my mind, I was pissed that he would presume to beckon to me like a dog or worse, and I would get him back for it later. He fastened his arms around me and hugged me tight. "I like you, kid. You're smart and you don't do what you're told. Maybe if you'd grown up down in the city we could have been awesome partners in this. But you didn't, so you don't have to. Get what I'm saying? You don't_ have_ to live like this."

"I like living with you," I whispered. _I'm afraid to live with myself_, I didn't.

"I know, Birdie. But it's dangerous. And I'd love to put that Braginsky motherfucker in his place—you know I could—but I think it's a bad idea. I don't know him and his well enough. Get what I'm saying? I'm not certain of the repercussions. And sure, street wars have been started over things a lot less important than you, Matthew, but I get the feeling you don't want to become New Haven's very own Helen of Troy."

"Why can't I stay? Can't I just—hide out here?"

"Because they'll find you. One of these days you'll be out getting the paper, or home alone, or I'll be in the shower, and they'll find you and you will wish you're dead before they're finished." I _already_ feel that way, I wanted to say. Maybe I_ want_ it to be over sooner rather than later. Maybe I'd rather die here with you than go back to California, a place that's already proven to hold no love for me. "Or you'll run away from me again, and they'll find you before I do. It's nearly happened a few times already, Birdie. And I won't have that on my conscience."

But Gilbert was a sociopath. I don't think he had a conscience.

All the same, he took me to the airport later that week. We both wore huge sunglasses and hoodies and security "randomly selected" us for inspection about thirty times apiece. He paid for my one-way ticket in cash and pressed a wad of bills in my hand before boarding. "Remember what I asked you to do. Try to contact old friends. Rent an apartment. Buy some new clothes. Please, please stay clean. Go to those dumbass Twelve Step meetings if you think it'll help."

I started tearing up because this homicidal drug dealer was the nicest person I'd ever met.

"Naw, Birdie, none of that."

"How will I find you again?" I asked, voice muffled through hoodie sleeve.

He smiled sadly, eyes starling sincere. "You won't."

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

There's something about Alfred that I've wanted to know for a long time. Even if I were willing to talk, though, I'm not sure how I would ask. It's the kind of answer I'm not supposed to care too much about, especially considering…well, considering everything.

Does Alfred Jones have a girlfriend?

Promised myself that I'd never try to understand love ever again. And this isn't really a bid for his heart, nor a scheme to get him into my bed. It's not even about wondering if I have a chance. I like him, I would like if he liked me, but I don't necessarily want to do anything about it. I just want to know. It's a purely selfish curiosity.

When I wake up, he's at work. He always comes home at noon, or if I'm up and energetic I go pick him up. Every single time I do that, he makes a comment about me growing into a big ol' softie. But he knocks a hand against my shoulder and gives me that side grin, mostly joyful and mocking but with just enough sincerity to get me hooked. I do it again and again and call it my reason for getting up in the morning and pray he never stops.

We go home and eat lunch together. In the afternoon he browses community college course catalogues—"Thinking about getting a degree that will actually do something for me"—or watches TV.

"Why don't you come watch a movie with me, Mattie?"

No thanks, I have a date with the wallpaper today. Like every day. We stare deeply and soulfully into each other's eyes.

"Oh my god, dude, when did you get so boring? Come on. I have a Netflix account. Let's choose a movie." I'm about to get up, but before I have the chance to indicate this to him, he's pushed one arm under my waist and the other behind my knees and scoops me up, bridal style.

I'd make a sucky bride.

"Ow, shit!" He's laughing his head off, half dropping me back onto the bed. "Owwww, fuck, Mattie, I_ need_ my shoulder for things." I am unsympathetic. He laughs more at the look on my face, drops the rest of me. "You didn't have to _punch_ me, Christ. Where'd you learn that? You meet some street-fighting men in the last couple years?" Well, yes. And Raymond taught us all some basic self-defense in case of violent sex-seekers. Alfred seems to be less reluctant to bring up my past these days. Doesn't blush and stammer and stare at the tracks on my arms like he used to.

I was going to come see the movie anyway, I want to say. But should we really be pissed off when people predict us better than ourselves?

With as much dignity I can muster, I slide off the bed and march down the hall.

"What's this?" the smug bastard demands gleefully. "Is he—yes! He is! He's actually out of bed and making his way into the living room!" If I could have, I would have drawn attention to the accidental poetry in that statement. "He's actually going to _socialize_! He has deemed me worthy of—"

I kick him as he sits. "Son of a bitch, Matthew. I need to get you talking so you can destroy my self-esteem with words like the good old days. All this nonverbal communication is going to get my friends thinking you're an abuser."

I smile sweetly.

He hands me the X-box controller. "Pick a movie."

Ohoho. We'll see who's the smug bastard now.

"The. _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre_." He meets my eyes and wry grin with a gulp. _Remember?_

"Haha. Maybe it's better you don't speak. I can see you remembering. In your eyes. Stop that. Stop judging me." _Like old times_. Nonverbal communication is imperfect, so I reach over him (nearly falling into his lap, and he puts a stabilizing hand on the small of my back, and lord how it burns) to unhook my chalkboard clock from the wall.

"pansy," I write where three o'clock should be.

"How do you know I haven't gotten tougher, huh?" Because I don't believe this for a second, I pick up the controller and chose the complete four-hour rendition of _Hamlet_, with Kate Winslet and whatshisface.

"I should have known, Shakes."

I drop the controller into his lap and toy with the chalk for a second. Then write, "Gilbert used to call me Shakes too."

He stares at it for a second, then asks tentatively, "Who's Gilbert?"

"guy I knew," I scrawl, "back in New Haven."

"If you're willing to communicate via chalk, why won't you talk?" I look up and our eyes meet with a crack. _I don't know, _I think. "stubbornness, I think"

"Well, that's—your decision."

"you were about to say utterly imbecilic"

"Naw, I was gonna say retarded. But you're more PC, let's go with that."

"he called me Shakes because of the heroin" I write, because our interactions today have been too carefree and it's my job to ruin everything good in life.

He covers his face with his hands, like it'll shield him from the truth of my utter failure. "Shit, Matthew."

He doesn't look up from his hands. I shove at his shoulder. "let's just watch the movie" I write, but he needs a moment to collect himself. I honestly don't get why he's so traumatized by my past. It makes me weirdly jealous. My life is really really fucked up, and it feels like all I have left is the right to be miserable about it. He shouldn't get to indulge in _my_ sadness. I shouldn't have to share.

* * *

><p>He goes to the gym before dinner on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Then he gets self-righteous about it. "Matthew, you should start working out. You'll get more energy and feel less depressed…In fact, Dr. Kirkland told me it'll help stabilize your moods! How about it?"<p>

I take Zyprexa to stabilize my moods, Alfred. You should know. You're paying for it.

I guess he's just trying to spread the sunshine. Or maybe the way my BMI hovers near "emaciated" weirds him out. I like the bite of hunger, though. And losing weight reminds me of the value of self-denial. It's satisfying; it makes hunger and withdrawal satisfying. I know from experience that such a balance can't last forever, but until the binge it'll keep me from robbing a convenience store for drug money.

Despite my lack of response on the matter, he brings back his old bicycle the next time he visits his parents. Whatever. What the fuck ever.

I simultaneously appreciate and dread what his new-found activeness has done for his body. As he swaggers through the door, glistening—I kid you not, he fucking _glistens_—and releasing his pheromones into the surrounding atmosphere, he's honestly lucky I don't maul him on the spot. My restraint is heroic. I bet you'd agree, if you had to spend five minutes in a room alone with a toned and glistening Alfred F. Jones.

Yes, rape victims feel sexual desire too. People try to shame us out of it, or make assumptions about the health of our libidos. People think that one bad experience turns us off of sex forever, but that's not the case. I mean, would you permanently stop feeling hungry after falling ill with food poisoning? I don't trust people and physicality the way I used to, that's true. And there is a certain element of the "dirty" because popular media has convinced me I should feel only fear, and never desire. I should be traumatized and terrified and I should throw up the second somebody puts a finger on me. And sometimes I am afraid. But it isn't some all-encompassing, world-ending, debilitating fear of contact. It's more like the way you can forget the death of a family member until you start wondering what to get them for Christmas—but wait. I wonder what it would be like to kiss Alfred's neck—but wait.

And Alfred's affection is so different from what I'm used to. He isn't looking to fuck me or take advantage of me. I don't think he even likes me that much as a friend. But he looks at me in that way of his and I feel this frustrating ache I shouldn't, this thing I don't want or understand and so I push it away.

One evening _Forrest Gump_ is on TV and it's his favorite movie_ but film-watching is a group experience, Mattie, don't you know anything_. There's a tiny black and white ten by ten television in the kitchen, an ancient thing with bunny ears and that static we called "snow" or "ants" as kids. "I gotta cook dinner, so we can watch it here, in the kitchen. And you can help me out for once, you bum." Before it starts he goes to take a piss and comes back saying, "Dude, your hair. It's all over the bathtub. It's like a small furry rodent fell off your head and _died_." I laugh at that and he grins at me, so bright my stomach legit flips around in my abdominal cavity and I swear to god this is so _embarrassing. _

I don't have any idea how to cook, but Alfred doesn't actually expect me to help. He talks at me, tells a story about one of our mutual high school acquaintances. "I'm actually going to visit him in a couple days," he admits, sounding embarrassed. "I'll tell him you said hi."

I laugh, and Alfred joins nervously. I don't think he gets it. If he did he probably wouldn't laugh.

Pizza's in the oven and he's cold, so he brings a quilt from his bed and perches like a cocoon on the edge of the table. Only my feet are cold, so I rest them on his knees under the blanket.

We're sitting together when it gets to the part where Jenny is implied to have been sexually abused—they're running through the sunflowers, and it's so much more haunting in black and white, the feedback crackling like an impending storm. Alfred cuts a glance over at me. He tries to grab at my hand—

_but wait I've been hurt_—

I slap it away, feeling a little guilty but too embarrassed to fix it.

He picks up the remote and turns off the television.

Oh shit. Time for some well-intentioned but uninformed therapy talk with Alfred Film-Studies-Degree Jones.

"Matthew…Dr. Kirkland told me that I should respect your personal space, like, like it was sacred. But because of confidentiality he can't tell me why. Don't tell me…you didn't…you weren't…"

He of course knows about the penicillin shots I had to get to clear the chlamydia and syphilis. I'd sort of hoped he'd assume dirty needles. I mean, that's just as likely as the sex. For those few weeks I was working for Raymond, he made me carry condoms around and got me a blood panel, but when I was an "independent contractor" again, I didn't care. As long as I got the money.

Alfred wanders into the living room and returns brandishing the chalkboard clock at me. I refuse to take it.

"I know I have no right to ask about it…"

I stare him down. _No, you don't_, my eyes agree. _So why are you?_

He has the good grace to look guilty. But still curious.

"fine," I write, after ripping the chalkboard from his hands. "prostitute in San Fran for 5 mths. before that my roommate" My hand falters.

"Wait." He stares at that—_before that my roommate_—with a dawning horror. "You roommate? Like, at Yale."

Nod.

"That's the. You left me voicemails…about…that creepy guy."

I roll my eyes. Finally. Finally he fucking gets it.

"No," his voice catches. "Was he—did he—was it consensual?"

"the fuck do you think"

I can hear him swallowing next to me. And I feel bad.

And how the fuck is that fair, anyway? I was sitting on this information, waiting for him to understand and realize what his part in my tragic drama was. I was going to be there when he found out, I was going to savor the look on his face. I was going to watch him fall apart with remorse and not say a goddamn word. I was going to find some satisfaction. I was going to get some vindication. I was going to let him say, "It's all my fault," because maybe if he said it then I could believe it, and I could hate myself a little bit less.

But my whole life. My whole life has been everything but fair. Born into a family that expected too much, raised to never be satisfied with anything I did, twisted and crushed and broken by everybody I met. Is it something about me, I have to wonder. Is there something in me that calls out to sadists, "Come damage me?" Maybe something in us knows when we meet one: this person is a masochist. He thinks he deserves pain. So give it to him.

"Matthew," my name catches in his throat, and his fists curl in the blanket. The tears clog up his voice. "Is that why you started…" a break. Hushed by grief, he points at my arms.

"kinda."

"Meaning."

"he forced me"

"Meaning."

I grab his arm out from under the quilt and mime shooting him up.

The chalkboard clock ticks at a deafening volume. The second hand marches steadily across the damning words again and again: _he forced me he forced me he forced me he forced me. _For four minutes Alfred sits with one arm over his face and the other limp in my hands. When the buzzer for the pizza goes off, he lets out a gasp of surprise that turns into something else, and I realize he's _sobbing._

Since he seems unlikely to recover any time soon, I retrieve the pizza and set the timer for five minutes. Gotta let it sit or else the cheese will be too stringy to slice. The smell of it turns my stomach. _he forced me he forced me he forced me. _But I've had years of practice blocking this out. Sure it's harder without drugs, but I've learned to cope. Alfred will have to do the same. Shouldering guilt and shouldering shame are two very different things, but I'm a generous friend. I'll give him a minute. I'll help him the way he never helped me.

Put out the plates. He's still having a moment. Put out the cups. Still having that moment. Pour milk. Any second now. Slice the pizza.

Okay, this is kind of ridiculous.

He's not the one who had to live this nightmare. He's not the one who has to take anti-anxieties and anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. And antacids, though that one is mostly unrelated.

His shoulders shake with the force of it, but he tries to keep from making a sound. His hands cover his eyes so I won't have to see his tears. And some part of me appreciates that. But today, I'm also relieved to share the responsibility of this mess so reminiscent of a bad soap opera. Look, I have an audience! I feel the dark satisfaction we get when another soul looks at our life and wonders how we live it. _You poor thing, you've been through so much._ A sympathetic audience, at that! I'm glad there's someone crying for me, because I haven't had the self-regard to cry for myself in three years.

At the same time, it's none of his business. My life is mine, it's not for public consumption. What is wrong with him.

There's just no pleasing me.

I shove at his shoulder and he looks up, snot-streaked and ugly for once. I guess that's refreshing, him looking ugly.

"Matthew…" he starts, but I know if he tries to finish I'm going to have to murder him with the pizza-cutter. So I drag him into the living room, push him onto the couch, collapse next to him.

About two hours into our cuddle/snotfest, we somehow end up horizontal. His head is on my chest, spine curved against my stomach. My feet have wormed their way up the bottoms of his jeans, so they rest on the back of his calves and leech his body heat. It's how I do.

He's too miserable too be sexy. Mixed blessing.

* * *

><p>I wake up with the sun in my eyes, which is weird because I never open the blinds. I glare at the light and it glares back. It does it better. Eventually I get around to assessing my person, and, huh. I am wrapped up in some creature with at least six arms.<p>

Right. Last night. Okay, okay, shut up, I'm up.

Alfred's face is relaxed and much too pretty with the light bouncing off his fine cheekbones, sparking his lashes gold. I stare at the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose for at least half an hour.

Eventually he wakes with a groan, raising his hand wearily and rubbing his eyes, looking very much like a child and not the twenty-four year old man responsible for my financial well-being. He shifts around, unaware that he's stretched precariously on the edge of a couch and not in his queen-sized bed. I move with him, my arm squeezing protectively over his chest so that he doesn't fall over the edge.

His half-lidded gaze wanders around the room until it finally rests on my hands around his midsection, follows up to my arms and shoulders. He's confused. _Precious. _

I'm not sure how different things are supposed to be between us, now that he knows. We're both stumbling around in the dark on this one.

He takes a leaf from my book and says nothing. Just wriggles around until we're facing each other, me with my back against the couch and him with his back to the TV. His expression is soft, if lightly troubled, and I feel more at ease knowing he doesn't seem too uncomfortable. Offbeat Alfred, rolling with the punches. Sweet little well-meaning idiot.

I haven't taken my eyes off him for a second. It occurs to me that this is mildly creepy.

Alfred is watching back, intense enough to make me dizzy. I swallow hard, my heartbeat quickening to beat in time with the tick-tock of that infernal clock, the only sound in the room besides our quiet breathing. Somehow in the course of the night, the blanket got entirely wrapped around Alfred's legs. I tell myself that the only reason I haven't pushed him away yet is because I'm cold and he's so toasty-warm.

Alfred's eyes dart around. Our faces are so close that he has to focus on small pieces at a time: my left pupil, the lashes, the lid, on to the right eye. A heap of snapshots, to be assembled in his mind as a single Matthew-mural. My hand is curled up against his chest and I can feel the accelerated beating through my palm. We're lucky it's not the other way around. My heart is probably tapping out the Morse code for "GET IN MY BED NOW FULL STOP" Alfred's eyes search mine, and then his fingers passively hook onto my wrist.

"How on earth did we manage to stay asleep through the night?" he asks, breaking the tension.

His breath is sour, but his voice is low and rough and rumbly, like gravel.

Okay, fun's over, I try to convince myself. No more cuddling. I sit up and slide off the couch, trying to pass it off as a stretch and not a tactical retreat. But when I stand, black creeps around the edges of my vision. Vertigo. Blood pressure's getting too low again, side-affect of self-imposed starvation. I sway back against the couch, Alfred's hand steadying on the curve of my back. "Hup," he says incongruously.

I have a sudden premonition that this will be the rest of our lives together: me, stupidly trying to stand up on my own; and him, supporting me when I invariably fall.

* * *

><p><em>Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you<em>_  
>Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you<br>The vagabond who's rapping at your door  
>Is standing in the clothes that you once wore<br>Strike another match, go start anew  
>And it's all over now, Baby Blue<em>

* * *

><p><strong>Please review! <strong>Next chapter will contain some more concrete romance, but finals. Finals are ruining everything. I will try to update as soon as possible! As my poor Selfish Sickness readers know, this story is currently my darling. It tends to write itself.


	6. Chapter 6

**Warnings! This chapter goes into detail about sex work. There is also some discussion of bulimia** (though none of the characters actually suffer from it). And more of the same drug use and mentions of self-harm.

**Notes: **I've never been to San Francisco or used their bus system, so I'm just making that part up as I go along. If you happen to know your way around SFTS, feel free to give me a crash course! Matthew does a little monologue that mocks Whitman's "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" I actually love that poem to pieces.

**Soundtrack for Chapter 6**: "Fire Inside" by Bob Seger

* * *

><p><em>There's a hard moon risin' on the streets tonight<em>  
><em>There's a reckless feeling in your heart as you head out tonight<em>  
><em>Through the concrete canyons to the midtown light<em>  
><em>Where the latest neon promises are burning bright<em>

_You're out on the town, safe in the crowd_  
><em>Ready to go for the ride<em>  
><em>Searching the eyes, looking for clues<em>  
><em>There's nowhere you can hide (the fire inside)<em>

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

When I was in the hospital for the second time—an accidental overdose, I think—they did a full-body checkup while I was still unconscious. When I came to, the doctor started talking about dual-enrollment rehab centers to treat both drug addictions and bulimia.

"Bulimia?" This was news to me.

He explained that the wounds on my hand and the acid corrosion in my throat were consistent with chronic bulimia. "You have esophageal strictures. That's a build-up of scar tissue in your esophagus, which will affect your ability to swallow if you don't stop. Not to mention the risk of gastric rupture."

Oh, right. Acid reflux had given me issues since elementary school. I had neither kept up with the medication nor watched my eating habits in the three years before that moment. Chocolate, soda, anything spicy, and even milk made it act up. Binge drinking and its side effects certainly didn't help, not to mention several _vomitous _experiences with opiate withdrawal. I vaguely remembered puking blood in front of Gilbert once, and the way he freaked out. And the way I just thought, God I hope this kills me.

The scar on my finger came from this one time I got mugged while dumpster diving. I didn't have any cash on me, _I was dumpster diving_, but I hadn't gotten around to pawning my high school class ring yet. It had been a congratulatory gift from my parents and I was holding onto it for some stupid sentimental reasons. Anyway, the guy snuck up behind me and growled that he'd skin me unless I gave it to him, which was how I knew he was green (experienced muggers are usually calm and businesslike and almost apologetic). It should have slipped off right away because of how much weight I'd lost, but my knuckles were swollen from the cold and malnutrition, and I couldn't work it loose. He yanked my arms back and used the knife as a lever. It scraped off a line of skin that hung down my finger like a loose thread for days. I tugged at it often, wondering if my body would unravel if I kept on pulling.

So I tried to explain this to the doctor, who nodded skeptically and asked if I would sign the AMA form.

Bulimia, huh.

Funny disease: to eat everything in sight, and then purge it from the system. To consume and toss back what you're given. To waste. To consume so much of something essential to life, only to petulantly refuse it, to make it moot, to destroy the one thing keeping you alive.

It fit so well for an incorrect diagnosis.

* * *

><p>See, that second visit to the hospital was in San Francisco, not two months after Gilbert had put me on a plane with enough money for three months' rent.<p>

I don't remember much about the month I tried to be good. Not much happened. I used Gilbert's money to buy new clothes and food for two weeks and picked up every newspaper I saw and obsessively checked the Classifieds for job openings. I circled a hundred options and never called a soul.

I don't remember being lonely then, though I must have. San Francisco was just far enough from home to scare me and just familiar enough that it was like being punched in the gut with memories every time I walked outside. But it wasn't miserable. It was almost peaceful, in a way, and a little surreal; it felt like playacting at being a grownup, far away from prying eyes and the associated dangers of reality. To keep up that illusion, I limited my social interaction to almost nothing.

Going to the grocery store was an intensely complicated process that required hours of planning and rallying. Talking to my landlady and my friendly neighbors caused so much stress that I only left my apartment when absolutely necessary—and sometimes not even then. I washed my clothes in the sink rather than risk the Laundromat. I ate only one meal a day to conserve food.

It all came crashing down because of the dish soap.

Four weeks into my new life in San Francisco, I ran out of dish soap. I considered just eating off dirty plates for the rest of my life, but that harkened back to those filthy days of eating trash, and thinking about that made me throw up. So the game plan was this: sit down, breathe deep. Make a list of everything I needed and might need in the future both foreseen and unforeseen. Breathe deep again. Find out what bus circuit I needed to be on. Check, double-check, triple-check that I had wallet, keys, ID, switchblade. Is the switchblade okay? Illegal concealable weapon, could get arrested. Otherwise vulnerable, could get murdered, raped, shot up with heroin by some creep who wants to love me—

Breathe deep. Yeah, okay, switchblade.

I waited by the peephole for a good five minutes to make sure that none of my fellow tenants were about. And then I managed to get on the correct bus (I checked every twenty seconds, Bus F-25, to the commercial center).

Supermarkets have always been stressful. A dozen different brands of the same product, floor to ceiling displays of hectic color, everything perfectly designed to attract attention, yelling "Buy me, buy me!" There is so much. Aisle after aisle of mass-produced food, packaged and boxed and sitting there, just a dollar ninety-five away from my belly. But there is so much. So much that it's really more for display than practicality, because it isn't possible that all this _stuff_ will get bought and used before its expiration date or its obsolescence. Too much too much and I had spent my last two years eating leftovers from trash cans.

The abundance was terrifying and enchanting. I wanted it all, everything, more than I could ever use. I wanted to buy it all and throw most of it away just to convince myself I could.

All my shirts had long sleeves, but there was some hollowness in my eyes and cheeks that must have tipped the world off. Everybody cut their glances quickly away from me, then twitched with little aborted double-takes. My heart beat faster, but nobody was yelling at me to get out, thief, so it was okay.

Until there was this woman.

She had beautiful red hair, which was the only reason I looked up from the floor in the first place. She had laugh lines and bone-white skin and just this mass of gorgeous ruby fuzz like a halo 'round her head. My gaze locked on her as she passed, and the smiling woman stopped smiling. Her expression narrowed; she glanced away and then suspiciously back. She hated me, I decided. And I couldn't help but watch, like the way your eyes grab at a train wreck and can't look away.

Only it hit me that I was on the other side looking out. _I_ was the oddity, the monster, the man who had seen too much. The fuck-up, the loser, the huge disappointment.

I was the train wreck.

It's still true now. The way people look at me: shrinks, doctors. They can't look away. That train I jumped on as a naïve little teenager, that train to the "extremes of human existence," or whatever pretentious bullshit name I gave it: wrecked. And here I am. I have no idea where to go from here, how to pick up the smoking wheels and broken glass and twisted iron of my former self and put it back together into something that isn't grotesquely different from the rest of the world.

Pioneers, O Pioneers! Leave your home and your family and carve out your future as stone from water! Do what you please and who you please however you please! Grasp your destiny! Take to the streets and snort drugs and breathe misery and whore your body out to survive! Onward to glory! No-one will miss you anyway.

And it hit me then, in that grocery store, with that woman looking at me like I was less than human, or more than human but in an ugly way: I would never be what I was. I was marked and dirty forever. Have you ever hated yourself so much that you imagined running or flying or swimming away from yourself? And the you that you're trying to escape from, the first you always trying to catch up to yourself, the second, pure self you imagined had split away, all the dirt and filth left behind, and you just want to outrun yourself, you just want to stop being yourself. O shrieve me, shrieve me. I had that moment. I've been having that moment for years since, but right then it came over me, it overcame me, and-

Panicked, I abandoned my cart in the scary pink aisle with all the weapons of gender-conformity indoctrination, and I caught a random bus and got off on a random stop and wandered around until I found the worst parts of the city. And they called out to me, "Black tar, black tar," ghosts of the ancestors of the supermarket, street vendors crying out for their products "Buy me buy me!"

And so I did.

I found a construction-site Port-O-Potty to shoot up in. It was rank and close and the safest I felt since New Haven. Maybe safe is the wrong word; maybe "at home" fits better. After a month of being clean, the veins popped up easily in my forearm like tree-roots under a sidewalk. I laughed a little. How marvelous! I thought, cinching the belt with my teeth.

Christ. Somebody fucked this up.

All of this. I mean, is it really too much to ask? Any of us? We're here, all of us just unceremoniously dumped here, squalling and bloody and in pain, no consent on our parts, and is it really too much to ask that it be just a little easier, that there be some point, that some of us don't have to turn to wrecking our brains and bodies for just a short break from the screaming?

But those thoughts will come later. The ability to blame others and make excuses will come later. At the time, I thought that all I needed was another hit. And then everything would be okay.

Somebody fucked up.

Anyway. It was pretty much over after that. I spent all my money on drugs, got kicked out of my apartment, lost all the weight I'd managed to gain. I was exactly the same as before, only with a new layer of guilt: somebody had given me the chance to get better, and I'd spit it back in his face. I'd puked it up on his shoes.

* * *

><p>I took to sleeping on porches during the daytime while the residents were at work. It was the perfect system for my fellow between-jobs between-houses buddies. There's a niche set up for every kind in this world—because the world forces us into these spaces. We can only exist because society is designed to allow us; I mean, really, society is designed to create us. It just always works itself out, you know?<p>

Anyway. Here's how it goes: you get together in groups of five and swarm the middle-class porches, you scavenge for some newspaper, you drape it over your face, and you sleep for a few precious hours. Sleeping at night is harder because it's cold and the house-owners call the cops. You have to go to the park—where cops will wake you up again—then under the bridges, where you will dream about jumping off—then, if you get really desperate, to the shelters.

When Gilbert's money ran out, I started loitering at the Laundromat, stalking guys between 5'5'' and 5'8'' (I was so thin I had to wear clothes for shorter guys; shirts and pants designed for six-foot men just slid right off my coat-hanger bones.) When they were distracted I struck. I took to shoplifting and selling these small wares and some stolen clothes out on the street. But that only brought in small change, and my habit was steadily growing (as these things do). I tried to get in with the corner boys, but no idiot was about to let a junkie anywhere near a stash.

That's when I started turning tricks.

It was an accident, the first time I was a whore. (The first time I was a whore in Frisco, anyway. New Haven was just an extended outcall that Ivan paid for with heroin, now that I think on it.) But the first time I was a whore out west, I had been looking for a guy who sold the purest shit for just a little more than my dealer. Somebody gave me directions while I was mid-nod, so everything was all mixed up in my head. I ended up wandering down Polk Street, which was (and still is) notorious for its freelance sex workers.

When the car pulled up beside me, I knew what it wanted. You develop an intuition on the street, and maybe I'd been thinking about stooping that low for a while. Yeah, I'd been considering it for a while. A voice in the back of my head whispered "there are lots of ways to make money…"

He asked how much, and I guessed a number.

"Twenty dollars lower and you have a deal." I took it. One-thirty was enough to keep me high for a whole week.

Here's the thing about sex work: it's not necessarily the horrible, soul-killing nightmare that most people will have you believe. Sometimes it sucks, like when the john hates himself for wanting you—you get that a lot in America, people who hate themselves for wanting, but do it anyway, take and take and take and eat and feel bad and puke it up—and they hit you to hate themselves less. But that was maybe one in twenty, so most days I expected no more than a little pain and a lot of shame.

_Shame ain't good for much_, Gilbert used to tell me. _It don't mean as much as you seem to think_. He wanted me to let it go. I still haven't even begun to figure out how.

I was a police informant somewhere in the hullabaloo. I liked some cops. Some of them are smart enough to realize that they can't make much difference with their feelings, so they use their wallets. "Give me some info on X and I'll buy you a meal." The really desperate ones just give you the money straight, maybe with the intention of keeping you hooked on drugs and hooked up to the information.

Sometimes I deluded myself into thinking that this made me a good person. Narc-ing on dealers and prostitution rings. This is something a martyr would do, right? Total self-sacrifice. Charitable, even. I was doing the world good and asking for nothing in return. They spit on me and jeered at me and I was marked ugly and ruined forever, but I was doing a job that needed doing.

That's when I was feeling optimistic. Most of the time I didn't think, but when I did, I thought about Alfred. I thought about my parents. I thought about getting accepted to Yale, taking classes from the finest minds of the century. I'd had a life, and a future that didn't end in overdose or starvation.

I remembered Gilbert, giving me his money to help me get clean.

And I hated myself, so, so passionately. I made me sick. Oh, god, I made myself ill.

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

"So, remember that friend I was telling you about? The one I've been going drinking with?"

We're standing in the kitchen together, separated by the new yard of space. Since that time we slept on the couch together, pretty much impaling ourselves on emotions too sharp to be sappy, Alfred's been avoiding me like the plague. I'd make an uncomfortable joke about the contagiousness of venereal diseases if I felt like talking.

"Okay, well, here's the thing. He's like…we're like…"

I start biting my lip. _Dating. Dating. Obviously dating. _It's like being stuck in public school again, when the teacher asks what DNA stands for and everybody but you's too stupid to know.

"Dating."

My lip bleeds a little. It tastes like metal. I need to sit down.

"So, like. I should have been upfront about that when you moved in, obviously. I mean, being gay." He's blushing and restless, hands fluttering around at his belt, the counter, his hair. He's so shifty about this, and I can't help but think that this relationship can't be healthy. If he's going to be so ashamed of it. "And so if you _do_ want to move out or whatever, there's always the center to go back to, or we could try calling your parents again—"

I cut him off with a quick shake of the head. What kind of hypocrite would I be to have a problem with that? Attempts to convey this are not very effective. But whatever.

"I mean, are you…" I get a good look at his face, and it's gone red. He won't look me in the eye. So obviously ashamed, and how ridiculous is that? He has no reason to even know the meaning of the word. "God, I'm sorry, I shouldn't just spring this on you, I should have like, told you over dinner or bought you an apology chocolate bar—"

Alfred, are you dating me? Am I secretly the guy you're dating?

"—but anyway, I just. Wanted to make sure it won't be a big deal."

I shake my head, then nod. He's asking the wrong questions again. I swear to god he does this to me on purpose.

But he gets the gist, blushes a little more, mumbles a thank you and an excuse about the bathroom, stumbles on his way out. What a fucking cutie.

And if there's anything that disturbs me about this development, that's the one. The cute thing. My childhood crush on Alfred still has some of its stupid-claws in me, and before it was just a silly little thing I could laugh about maniacally to myself late at night. But he's gay? There was hope, and I chased it away just by being the fuck-up I am? That's too much. The universe is laughing at me, and I can't laugh with it on this one. That's too much.

The more I think about it, the worse I feel.

* * *

><p>That night he goes out again, and I have a little panic attack because the kitchen window won't lock, and the wind keeps brushing tree-limbs up against it.<p>

Christ. Heart pounding, hands sweating, and jesus, it feels like detox all over again, with the way I can't stop shaking. I tug Alfred's comforter off his bed and curl up in front of the television, don't bother even turning it on, inhaling his cheap Axe and aftershave odor. He needs to grow up, get a classier cologne. Get the fuck _home, _he didn't _tell _me he'd be out so long. Probably gettin' it on with his new boyfriend. I try not to think about it.

He stumbles in at two in the morning, reeking of sex and booze. I don't even need words to make fun of him, just a side-eye and a raised eyebrow and—

"Shut up shut up shut up shut up," he shouts continuously down the hallway and into the bathroom. It's funny because I was _actually tempted_ to break my silence just to make a lewd comment.

I spend the night on the couch, trying really hard not to think about it. But every time I breathe, I do.

* * *

><p>I mean, I wouldn't want to date Alfred anyway. Too much history there. I don't want to date until I'm all fixed up, 'til I can brush my hands together, <em>Glad that's over, <em>and I can use my sordid past as a hook for strangers, _My, aren't you interesting_. People who know you as a recovered addict, they think you're strong. But people who knew you while you were still an addict, while you were sixteen pounds with your hair and teeth falling out, begging for money, stealing clothes, institutionalized—they'll know who you are forever. They'll have seen your worst, and they think you're the saddest, weakest creature on the face of the earth. Because you were. You have been. And they can't unsee that.

So anyway, Alfred will never be able to think of me as a strong, healthy individual. Even when I am, he'll see the addict. He'll see himself saving me from the madhouse, the rehab center, the streets, the needle, my grave. He'll always have this savior complex with me, I know, and I'll always have a victim complex when he's around. I still do, I can feel it. The way I just want to curl up inside his arms, him holding me together. With him I remember my wounds. I want him to fix them. I should get out of here.

* * *

><p>I never wanted to <em>have<em> Alfred Jones. I just wanted to want him in peace.

* * *

><p>It's almost September now, though you'd never know it by the weather. It feels more like mid-October. Alfred lends me one of his old jackets; I find a twenty in the pocket and keep it for myself.<p>

New therapy technique of the month: Dr. Kirkland just gives me a pack of crayons and a sketchpad and tells me to go nuts.

Okay, not really. It's his way of getting me to do associations: he'll tell me to draw the first thing that comes to mind when he says X. Love is a heart (not creative or informative, but Hallmark's brainwashed me), hate is fire, hope is the sun, fear is a dumpster, death is a gravestone with my name on it. Then come the tricky ones: mother, I just scribble for a few minutes. Father gets the same treatment. I'm not being melodramatic, like he probably thinks; it's just that I don't have them anymore. I'm over them. They're just big black spots to me.

He says, "Alfred," and my mind's a perfect blank.

"Nothing?"

C'mon, think. If I wait for a suspiciously long time, he's going to figure out that that's a soft spot, a confliction point or whatever, and he'll pick at it. Or he'll conspicuously dodge it until I get so antsy I bring it up myself. The game's already up, I'm sure, but in the end I just draw his eyes. Alfred's big pretty baby blues, and he always hated it when I called them that, when I used to make fun of him for being so…apple-pie, so Midwest-perfect.

Putting down the crayons and handing over the sketchpad, I let Dr. Kirkland flip through the pages that he'd already peeked at upside-down. It's awkward, as always, to let somebody see my own work. Watching friends read over your paper is agonizing, watching the teacher grade it is worse; this is kind of like that, only I'm not nearly as confident in my artistic abilities as I am in my paper-writing abilities.

It's so _stupid_. After going through a certain amount of things, after brushing against death so often you know its shoulder better than your own mother's, you'd think that I would be able to stop caring about how other people judge my work. But I haven't stopped caring. My fingers twist painfully into a loose thread of my shirt, the tips turning blue from loss of blood. They're bony and pale, like a dead man's, a useless pile of bone and skin. What horrible hands.

"That's interesting, that you think of Alfred himself, instead of making a symbol for him. Or is it his eyes…do you feel like he's constantly looking at you, judging you? Is he judgmental, or are you failing to judge him?"

I can't figure out how to respond, so I don't.

* * *

><p>There's an old man on our floor who paces in the hallway at strange hours of the night, and he is one of the few people who can make me feel guilty about not talking.<p>

Now, guilting was one of the first things my old shrinks used to try-_Oh Matthew, your friend is paying for this therapy, and you're not even going to try to let us help?-_and it put me on defensive mode even faster than asking about my family.

To me, words should be very pointed, should always have a purpose. Like facial expressions: they should come only at your command, in the exact intensity and shape you desire. Same with emotions. The last one you can't help, and the middle one is a dicey proposition, but any idiot can keep his mouth shut until he needs to say something. Right? But not many people do. They just say what they're thinking, without thinking about it. Pollute the atmosphere with things like "Nice weather" and "I like Cheetos" and "Listen to my sobstory, aren't I a trooper." Me not talking, that's my way of controlling my impact on the world.

But the old man in the hallway doesn't know that. And I can't really explain it to him. So every time I leave the apartment, and he's there pacing, he says, "Good evening, young man." Young man, he calls me. This sweet old guy who's too proud to use the elevator deems me worthy of wasting his rapidly running-out breath. Me, a punk like me.

If anybody in the whole world is worthy of words, however stupid and stilted, it's him. And I just let him go on thinking that I'm a rude little punk, and he still asks me to have a good evening.

"Good evening, young man," he says to me, as Alfred and I return from therapy and dinner right after. (He takes me out to dinner and we live together: I have to wonder if Alfred's boyfriend, or whatever, knows about me. I don't even know his name, Alfred's _that_ ashamed of him.

Or me.

Probably me.)

"Do you know that old guy?" He's putting our leftovers in the fridge, so he doesn't see my shrug.

"Right, okay, I have to fill in your part of the conversation for you. _Yeah, Alfred,_" he squeaks high-pitched, and let the record show that when I use my voice it sounds _nothing _like that. "_Yeah, I do know that old guy in the hallway. _Oh, that's nice, Mattie, how'd you meet him?"

My breath freezes in my throat, and even if I were so inclined, I wouldn't be able to say a word. A sudden sting in my palm draws a gasp—fingernails.

"_Well, Alfred, it's a funny story. One day, I was going to a Twelve-Step meeting—_oh, wait! You don't go to those, do you."

I couldn't say a word if I tried.

And it's so _stupid, _it really is, the things that upset you after a couple years on the streets. I've had my head bashed in, my finger damn near hacked off, I've overdosed, eaten from dumpsters, sliced my own wrists, been locked up, and_ this_ is actually able to hurt me? An asshole-ish simpleton _mocking my voice? _Desperation is a fair excuse for any dignity lost on the street, but there is no way I'm going to let this motherfucker see what he does to me. Not now.

He freezes, head still in the fridge, and I just know he's about to turn around and apologize. He's gonna shout sorry at me 'til he can convince himself that I forgive him, or at least that I'm in the wrong for not forgiving him.

So I'm not going to give him the satisfaction.

Before he even starts moving, I'm spinning around, walking towards the door.

Because, alright, that's it.

I'm done.

I'm just so fucking over myself, and him, and accepting his charity.

I need to get out of here.

* * *

><p>Don't panic, I'm telling myself. It's just for a few hours, just to cool my head, just to walk it off. Until Alfred starts feeling resentful about my absence, is less insistent about saying sorry. I just want this to blow over.<p>

I'm not leaving for good. I have a home to go back to. Or, like, a shelter anyway.

But what the hell is the point of going back? Alfred will keep letting me live in his apartment and eat his food, and then he'll tote me around town, taking me to shrinks and restaurants. I'm like his pet. It's humiliating. It's beyond humiliating.

And I don't even _deserve _it—what he's giving me. I've fucked it up before, and I just know, I just know I'll do it again. I'll ruin everything he gave me, throw it back in his face. I'm so afraid. He doesn't deserve that. And I don't deserve this. I don't want him to know me anymore, _I _don't want to know me anymore. I'm trying to cut away my mistakes and outrun them, but the past always catches up.

The emptiness in my stomach—the well digging down—the nausea—the aching won't leave me. It's profound and consuming. I feel like curling up on the floor and crying. I need a thousand pounds of heroin. I need to drown myself in booze. I need Vicodin, Oxycontin, Hydrocodone.

That twenty dollar bill is still in this jacket.

Bulimic, huh.

When you think about it, aren't we all?

* * *

><p><em>And the lights go down and they dance real close<br>And for one brief instant they pretend they're safe and warm_

_Then the beat gets louder and the mood is gone_  
><em>The darkness scatters as the lights flash on<em>  
><em>They hold one another just a little too long<em>  
><em>And they move apart and then move on<em>


	7. Chapter 7

**Warning! This chapter contains drug use, sex work, and attempted suicide.**

**Notes: **Lots of Felix! And some Miguel(Cuba)/Matthew interaction—not really romantic. Also, Matthew hits his low point both Now and Then, so this chapter is heavy on the self-loathing and self-pity. I'm just like AUGH Matthew take some responsibility AUGH. What I mean to say is that it's all uphill from the end of this chapter, so bear with.

**Soundtrack for Chapter 6**: "Yer Spring" by Hey Rosetta!

* * *

><p><em>Doctor unbandage my eyes<br>I feel the light and I'm ready to be rising!  
>Doctor uncover my ears<br>I hear the chorus weeping! I see the people singing:_

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

The streets are about as warm and inviting as I remember them from those months before Alfred, which is to say not at all. I know it's all a matter of perception, but how else am I supposed to feel, clutching Alfred's jacket to my chest against a chilly wind by the gloomy light of dusk, crossing the streets I once slept out on, wandering through alleys where I used to mug rich tourists?

God _damn_ it, even if there's not a god around to do that.

And it's not like I ever even asked for this, you know? For his help, for anyone's help. I mean I did, before, back when there was something they could have done. Four years ago. But now it's almost pointless. I'm too far gone, I'm irredeemable—why would they even want to try? To _save_ me? What a fucking joke. There's nothing left to save. I can't love anyone properly, my "capacity for trust" is all fucked up, I can't even have a glass of wine without hankering for some heroin, I can't even _talk, _because why the hell should I open my mouth if nobody's going to listen? If everybody hears the wrong words?

Dark falls fast and cold. A drizzle starts up, of the chilly autumn variety. It's the slow and seeping kind of wetness, makes you damp so slowly that you hardly notice, so that it's mostly the chill and misery you get instead of the fresh feeling of new rain.

And isn't it funny that I should see one of the old dealers I used to know, standing on the corner and looking conspicuously inconspicuous.

Bad idea bad idea bad idea, why the hell not? I want it, and the reason not to do it is a mile away, with his head in a fridge saying sorry.

"Whatever you got, however much a twenty will get me," I tell the corner-boy, pulling the bill out of Alfred's jacket pocket. My voice sounds like a stranger's, like when you hear a recording of yourself and think, "That can't be me." Squeaky, stark, too loud.

Five months of silence broken to buy drugs. Isn't that funny. "Whatever you got, however much a twenty will get me." What an anticlimax. Guess I fumbled that one. It should have been "No, but I mustn't!" I should've at least offered a more dramatic parting for my sobriety, like, "I have lived both worlds, and I choose this!"

Guess I've been reading too much Victorian drama. Anyway.

First time anybody's listened to me in what feels like years, because he gives me a baby-baggie, no questions asked. He just comes through for me like that. I'm oddly touched that somebody around here keeps his fucking word.

This is the part where I freak out, like, no, this is stupid, this will ruin everything you've worked for, don't do this to yourself, don't do this to Gilbert, don't do this to Alfred, don't. And then the other side of my head going, don't stop.

And I know that this could kill me, especially after being clean for so long—don't do this, don't ruin everything, you stupid fucking—there's a hornet's nest in my head, and in comparison, death seems peaceful. Quiet. I don't worry much about hell, because if it exists then it can't be much different from here.

So I find a convenience store with a bathroom to get high in. I'll have to snort it, because I don't have a jar or a lighter or a gun (a needle, that is). Injection is faster and stronger, but I guess it won't matter now. It'll be strong no matter what I do. Besides, I doubt that I have the mental fortitude to go ask for one.

All holed up in the convenience store bathroom now, a room with a single urinal and a sink, noplace to snort my ill-gotten gains but the floor.

So do it. Pour the baggy on the floor. Take off glasses, set them on the counter. Pull out a brown paper towel to use as a shitty straight-edge, separate the powder into little lines, pinkie fingernail as a scoop and straw.

Then the pause: should I really do this? I really shouldn't do this.

Really, _really_ shouldn't do this.

Do it anyway.

Then sit back and wait for everything to go quiet.

* * *

><p>Somebody's banging on the door, and I can't stay in here because it's a single person bathroom. Staggering out into the light, I'm worried about coming off as sober, so obviously the high hasn't hit yet. Good. Very good.<p>

My hands start to shake halfway down the street…gotta find a bench soon or risk plopping down on the pavement, getting tossed in jail for the night.

Shit. I left my glasses in the bathroom.

Oh well. I find a park, find a bench, collapse. It's cold but I don't feel it. My life is circling the drain and I'm just watching it. It's my fault and I don't care.

Time goes so slow, then really fast. The way a week feels like a year and a year feels like a week. It's like I'm on the cusp of sleep, when a minute can hold a lifetime, and three hours a perfect blank.

Rain falls, breath fogs, limbs heavy and numb but not from cold.

And I hear somebody calling my name from a mile away.

I don't care, I don't care.

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

In my defense, I was exhausted.

I mean, looking back on it, I have a defense for everything. I was hungry and desperate and lonely and hurt, and what else is there for a college dropout addict but whoring and thieving to survive?

Desperation and hunger were my big excuses for the prostitution. But the suicide…

Sometimes people will get very suspicious about my motives for that one. I can say with one hundred percent honesty that I just wanted to stop living, The End, but some people think drug addicts have the capacity for manipulation. I mean, when it comes to getting drug money, we're pros at manipulation and lies, but as for getting off the streets and into rehab? No. We don't waste our valuable remaining brain cells on things like that.

I wanted to die, full stop. The fact that this led to my institutionalization _did_ work out to my favor, or at least in the eyes of the rest of society, but it wasn't my intention at all.

I never had any hope for getting out of the addiction, and I guess that's where the exhaustion comes from. It gets so that all you have to look forward to is your next fix, and when the drugs stop working well enough to justify all the shit that goes along with them…why keep going? What makes it worse is that the only time you ever feel in control of the addiction is when you want it—when you don't want to stop, and so it feels like you can—but then when you want to stop, you can't. It's worse than horrifying. It's exhausting and monotonous and cyclical and the only way to break out of it is dying.

At least, that's what it feels like to somebody with no money and no home and no friends.

If you don't have the money for rehab, they just dump you out on the street to keep doing your thing. People tend to adopt very self-righteous attitudes about it, like, "Well, maybe if you weren't such a _bum, _you'd be able to afford a program. And why can't you just get better on your own? Are you really that weak? Don't you have any willpower?"

Obviously not. I willed myself to give up drugs, and when that didn't work, I willed myself to die.

I was successful in neither.

* * *

><p>I found a few homeless shelters where they let men sleep, but they were not as heavily guarded as I would have liked. I never felt safe sleeping in a room full of guys, especially not guys who looked as ratty and disrespectable as me.<p>

They gave me clothes, which was nice of them, and meals too, but if you stayed too long they started doing drug tests. A failed drug test would send you to a free clinic for an STD panel and pamphlets on addiction, and you weren't allowed back in without proof that you were trying to quit. Usually I just stopped going to those ones.

One night I was out on Polk Street, hawking my usual wares, when a pretty girl with blond hair and green eyes walked up to me. I thought she was about to proposition me, which would have been a welcome change, but then she said, "You too, yeah?" And I realized firstly that she was also a hooker and secondly that she was actually a he.

"Yeah. Smoke?" I held out a cigarette, but he shook his head.

"No, those things'll, like, kill you. I'm Felix, by the way. Go by Trixie if you're buying."

"No thanks, I've got my own to sell. Matthew." I held out my hand, but he ignored it.

"Hey, listen, you self-employed?"

"Sorry?"

"Self-employed. Do you have, you know, like, a pimp?"

I said no, and Felix smiled. "Want one? Raymond's really chill, he doesn't ask for a set amount every night, just a percentage. Always ten percent of your night's earnings. He does the math himself, thank god. He lost a couple recruits last week, was hoping for a few more. Interested?"

"What's so great about having a…a pimp?"

Felix cracked his bubblegum and rolled his eyes. "Only protection, like physical protection, and also sexual protection, like free condoms, and also he'll get you checked for bugs and itches, you know. And if you tell your johns that you got a pimp, they'll, like, stay in line if they know what's good for them. Oh, and _lodging. _I can tell you're one of the homeless ones. You'll get to sleep in the rooms during the day and fuck your clients in them at night. And he'll get you some nice clothes, better than those ratty ones you're wearing that make you look like you just stumbled out of the orphanage."

Felix was a nice guy, and Raymond's terms seemed fair enough. So I agreed, mostly on basis of the lodgings.

And then they told me: "If you're using, you have to quit." Apparently it was Raymond's policy to have clean whores, to prevent the spread of STDs and to make the ring less likely to get busted by cops. It was a very good policy, and one that doubtless kept a lot of unfortunate men and women from falling all the way to rock bottom.

They tried with me, they really did. Gave me a thousand more chances than I deserved.

* * *

><p>Withdrawal was hell, but Felix took me through it. "I'm really going out on a limb for you, man. Like, Raymond wouldn't have even bothered if I didn't put in a good word. And I guess if you weren't so pretty. But you better get it together and stay clean, yeah?"<p>

And I did, for a good long while.

The job wasn't as rough with Raymond watching my back. There were nervous young men and callous old geezers, skinny college kids and beer-gutted, hairy, mustached plumbers, married men, power bottoms, control-freak tops, giggling women, dominatrices, and everything in-between. I started to get into the rhythm of the work—nasty analogy not intended—understanding what different clients wanted, how to spot a bruiser, which repeat-johns showed up and when, which ones were likely to tip well, which ones were likely to skip payment. I had enough money to buy my own clothes and food. And one day I realized that I wasn't just rolling with the punches anymore: I was getting a few moments to myself, time to recover and stand up and look around at everything.

For the first time in a long time, I could look up from my feet.

And that's when I saw Miguel.

I had been working the streets for about three months clean when Felix told me that he'd found a day job as a grocery cashier. Apparently he and his boyfriend (also one of Raymond's boys, and I don't even want to _consider_ how fucked-up close those two must be) were saving up to buy an apartment, hopefully to leave this lifestyle for good.

When Felix offered to get me an interview there, I almost refused.

"Oh my god, don't be stupid. Mattie, I don't know if you've noticed this, but being a rent boy isn't lucrative or anything. Right? Don't you want to get out of this mess? Don't you want something better for yourself?"

"I tried 'something better.' I fucked it up. It isn't worth trying again."

Felix scoffed. "Of course you are."

* * *

><p>Miguel Lopez was sweet on me, and that alone should give plenty of warning for his Jude-like patronage of lost causes.<p>

"Those pants are way too big for you, Matthew. Would you like me to buy you some new ones?"

"Oh no, I really can't accept—"

"Of course you can. I insist. And anyway, I'm sure your customers would thank me for making things a little more visible." He winked, and it wasn't until the next day that I realized he was making an ass-joke. I wondered if that could be considered sexual harassment in the workplace, but quite honestly I was endeared to such a subtle expression. It had been a long time since anybody had actually flirted with me, instead of just throwing money in my face and saying "I'm going to fuck you now."

He invited me to his apartment for ice cream and movies occasionally, when I could take off from selling my virtue. He had bad taste in movies, but I never told him.

"We gotta get some meat on those bones," he'd say.

I fell asleep on his couch a lot. He let me put my head in his lap. I guess he was kind of the sweetest person I'd ever known.

So of course I broke his heart. Of course I fucked it up.

* * *

><p>The middle-aged man, flanked by two young children, had swaggered into my check-out line wearing aggressive overconfidence like a wrestler with a law degree. Currently he held out a wine bottle for inspection. "It's just that this wine wasn't of the quality I expected, you know?"<p>

Well, what did he fucking expect from the beverage isle at Wal-Mart? "Sir, if you don't have your receipt then I can't—"

"I understand that, but it was really just so disgusting. I shouldn't have had to pay for this. The quality is—can you just open your register and give me the money? The price-tag is still here, see, ten ninety-nine. I bought it from a blond girl, wearing big feather earrings. If she's working today, she'll vouch for me."

"I'm afraid I'm not authorized to give you a refund if you don't have a receipt." Motherfucker.

"Then go get somebody who _can_ do something, will you?"

I thought about taking his children aside and breaking it to them that their father was an utter douchebag, and that just because shouting very loudly at people sometimes gets them to obey you does not make it an acceptable social habit. Instead I paged Miguel.

He winked at me when he arrived, then turned to Irrationally Irate Customer #392349571. "What's the problem, sir?"

Irate Customer #392349571 explained his beef with the product, admitted that he'd lost the receipt, and insulted me for refusing to open my register and pay him for disliking cheap wine. Miguel apologized and led him away to exchange his bottle for another of equal value, and I heard IC #392349571 say something about, "Can't be easy, having to manage the disabled cashiers your employer hires."

_Fuck you_, I mouthed to his back, with accompanied hand gesture.

His spawn saw. To this day I cringe over it.

"Daddy, Daddy, that man just flicked you off!"

_Shit. _I shook my head and tried to look as innocent as possible. Miguel laughed nervously. "I think your son is imagining things. Matthew wouldn't do that, now _would he?" _He gave me the heavy side-eye.

"Of course not, sir."

Later, Miguel saw me in the break room and rolled his eyes. "Lord, save us from the entitled jerkasses of the world."

"I know, right? I've never met anybody so self-righteously egotistical. Not even at Yale."

"Oh." Interest tugged at his tone, like cold wind tugging at ratty clothes and creeping in. "Did you live in New Haven?"

"Yeah, for a few years."

"Why? Were you born there?"

He was going to make me say it. I hated saying it, and I still do. It's like admitting, "Well, I used to be incredibly lucky and successful, but I fucked it all up and now I'm an addict and a whore and a clerk at Wal-Mart."

People like making you say things, sometimes out of honest reluctance to assume and then sometimes out of malice. This used to be a problem for me, back when people expected me to say things.

"I went to Yale, for a year. Had to drop out, though."

"Holy shit." Miguel blinked and looked away. "Like, holy shit. I'm trying to play it cool, but that's…impressive. You must be really smart, huh?"

I shrugged, irritated. I prefer it when people pretend not to be impressed. "Well, I dropped out, so I can't be all that smart."

"Yeah, but you got in. It's not right that you're stuck in customer service when you have a brain like that. I'll talk to some people. Hey, are you any good at math?"

So it was that even though math was my least favorite subject, I was competent enough to be promoted to Till Manager (largely through Miguel's influence). I counted each till's money before a shift and after the shift, then compared it against the difference the computer claimed it ought to be. My wage didn't go up any, since according to Miguel I hadn't been employed for long enough to justify it. No matter; it was a blessing just to get away from the customers. I mean, I like people. In theory. With several hundred feet and a pair of binoculars between me and them.

Anyway.

Things were looking up for me. I was five months clean, living in an apartment, capable of buying food for myself, talking to Raymond about leaving his employ, and I even had a savings account. Is this finally it? I wondered to myself. Have I finally managed to claw my way back into the realm of functional human beings?

Yeah, right.

* * *

><p>I became a casualty of the unfortunate symbiosis between prostitution and drug use. I mean, I guess it isn't really fair to blame the prostitution, because I had <em>already <em>been an addict before I started that. Honestly it'd be more accurate to say that the symbiosis between prostitution and drug use noticed my battered sobriety shambling around after its eighteenth-or-so reanimation and tried to put it out of its misery.

Thing is, a lot of johns bring their drugs to the party. You know America, it's all sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. Hand-in-hand. And then it's only polite to offer to share, right?

For a while there, I was too smart and too scared to accept. But with my promotion came a sliver of self-worth, and with that came a reckless desire to feel good. My body remembered "feel good." My brain knew "feel good." I missed feeling good a lot. In all the wrong ways.

And so it was that just as my life was beginning to look up, I rediscovered my devastatingly addictive personality.

I don't even remember who it was that first offered it to me, though I suspect a student. Usually the older ones go for heroin, the I'm-giving-up drug. Students like amphetamines and stimulants to help them work harder. I remember being a student like that. Anyway, one day I happened to be tired enough to accept a little pick-me-up from a very persuasive man. And it got easier and easier to accept such offers, and then suddenly it was impossible not to.

First went my savings account, vaporized in less than two weeks on meth. I used it to work longer hours on both jobs, to make more money, to buy more meth. I chased that high, propelled by the sense that I was indestructible, I was successful, I was going to feel like this for the rest of my life, I was God.

My coworkers noticed that I was looking sick.

"This isn't cool, Mattie. I can see the fresh tracks on your arms. Like, c'mon. I'm not stupid."

"Are you okay, Matthew?" Miguel offered me some of his lunch, and I shook my head sharp and fast, manic-dancing to the electric current running through my brain and down my arms like puppet strings, I was sweating and feverish and not hungry a bit and speaking without punctuation, "I'm fine Miguel never better."

When I ran out of savings, the paychecks literally couldn't come fast enough. So I started skimming off the tills. It was uncommon for a cashier to have exactly the correct amount left in his or her till; it took a ten dollar discrepancy for management to get involved. So when I counted them up at the end of the shift, I'd subtract a dollar or two from every count and I'd pocket the difference.

The habit grew, as these things do, and I got greedier. Especially when Raymond told me that he couldn't keep me on anymore, if I was going to keep relapsing and putting his operations in danger. It was only fair, I knew.

So I was homeless again, and luckily my paycheck from the grocery store was direct deposit into my account, because I was no longer at my listed address to collect it.

* * *

><p>"Matthew, I need to talk to you in my office."<p>

He knew. I knew that he knew.

"Is there any way I can just quit now, so you don't have to go to the trouble?" I asked hopefully.

Miguel sighed, knowing now that I knew that he knew. "I won't call the authorities, if that's what you're worried about. We're letting you go, and you're not getting this month's paycheck. So don't even ask." He ran a hand over his hair. "I guess you could just leave now, never see me again. But you owe me an explanation. You owe me that much."

And I did. So I didn't run.

His office was windowless, poorly-lit, puke green, miserable. He looked enormous in his rickety little chair, his beefy shoulders pushing at the seams of his button-up shirt, and he didn't belong here any more than I did. He belonged on the wrestling mat, or on a motorcycle, or in a swivel chair at the head of a great corporation. Big meaty man full of life.

Me, I belonged back on the street. Under a pile of newspapers. In a shallow grave.

Us being so tragically displaced from our proper roles in life, I hoped that he might take pity on me and quickly sketch a few regretful noises before sending me on my way. No such luck.

"Why are you doing this to yourself?"

A tense silence. He had a clock in the corner of the room, high-pitched and loud. Sounded like the chatter of rats. "I'm an addict." I shrugged, feeling like a little shit. "Not much rhyme or reason to it."

"That's a cop-out, Matthew. You're smart enough to know that." He stared me down across the desk, and what gave him the fucking right?

"I'm tired of being smart enough to know better," I spat. "I'm tired. I'm just exhausted."

He just kept staring, disappointed.

"And I'm sorry. Really, I am."

"Then _stop_."

"It's not that fucking simple."

"But it _is. _It really kind of is."

* * *

><p>Ah, rock bottom. It has a specific flavor, desperation like a buzzing hum beneath the skin. I remember how hot my eyes felt all the time, the adrenaline rushes, and the way starvation made me jittery as a jonesing. I gave up the luxury of self-consciousness: I begged openly on the streets. I ate out of trashcans in broad daylight. I let a man fuck me with a broom for twenty bucks.<p>

It's hard to remember that era, because rock bottom requires and perpetuates a complete lack of reflection and consideration. If I had sat down and thought about it for even a second, I would've hauled off the nearest bridge and blessed the rocks that caught me.

Because I'm not very good at climbing my way out of shit. I just give up.

So I guess that's what eventually happened.

I lost myself on the streets and sold my body for money and over and over and over and—I was exhausted. This was getting exhausting, this business of going home with strange men, letting them fuck me for drugs or drug money, stumbling out in the morning to hide on the streets again and wait for my next john. Picture a boy, waking up next to a stranger in a house he's never seen before, lurching down the hall in search of a bathroom or an exit. Just a bathroom or an exit, either will do. Imagine him standing in a dark strange bathroom at four in the morning. There is half a line of cocaine on a small mirror—quickly snorted—and a razor on the soap dish. His reflection in the mirror is blank, expressionless. Close your eyes, and the sharp shape of his face follows you into the darkness, the stretch of sallow skin over bone and the deep shadows of his eyes. He picks up the razor, pops out the blades, slices his thumb shallowly. His heart has begun to pick up, you can see it in the pulse point at his neck, he feels the cut but it's separate from him, it's happening to a body that isn't his anymore. He has found both a bathroom and an exit. He considers.

In his defense, he is absolutely exhausted.

* * *

><p>Well. What can I say for myself?<p>

I guess I was just so fucking tired of everything.

So anyway, one week later Alfred Fucking Jones happened to hear my name from his neighbor, my doctor, and like any good former-best-friend-with-a-hero-complex, he waltzed into my hospital room and back into my life.

"I'm gonna take care of you from now on," he told me, and I said,

"Yeah, right."

And I never spoke to him again until this moment.

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

Matthew, Matthew. Thank god.

"He's not around," I mutter into my shoulder.

Did you just…say something?

"Yeah. But he's not around. God isn't. To say you're welcome."

Alfred's face swims into my line of sight, pale and panicky. I try to register this on an emotional level, but I can't. God, Matthew, he says, but it sounds like he's underwater. Or I'm underwater. Or I'm in a bubble. He's blurry, and he puts his arms around me, gets right up in my face. His hair is on my neck. I wish I could feel it.

Then the bubble pops. "Jesus, Matthew, you're freezing. Can you feel that?"

"Stupid question. Reuptake. Or blocked pain receptors. Yeah, that. Can't feel the cold."

"Okay, you're not making sense. You're talking and you're not making sense." I want to lecture him about neurotransmitters and the way opiates are shaped just right to—but his voice is so rumbly and nice. His arms are heavy. "Not sure how to feel about that."

"You don't have to feel anything if you don't want to." That made way more sense in my head. It's also the exact opposite of the truth. Like shame, the shame I'm not supposed to feel, and a helpless smile spreads across my face, as uncontrollable and unwanted as a trip to the dentist's. When they give you the laughing gas, I mean.

"What does that—? Never mind. Can you walk? Do you need the hospital? What _happened?_" He looks so worried and sad for me, and wait a second, why? Why does he want me to be okay? If I were him and he were me, I would just love to let him freeze to death on the street after what I—what he—did. What he did? God, this analogy's stupid.

"Just go away," I slur.

"No." And then he doesn't. Imagine that.

* * *

><p><em>Let the loser up. Let the loser up.<br>Let's get him up._


	8. Chapter 8

**Matthew in Rockland  
><strong>by Positively

**Notes: **Aaaaand things are looking up from now on! This one only needs a warning for language and mentioned Alfred/OMC, which we hopefully all know is doomed. Shipping sure does take the suspense out of things, doesn't it?

This short-but-sweet little update is dedicated to Liz, aka Riches and Wonders, who writes epic things. Happy birthday, love. You are so great, lordy lord.

.

* * *

><p><strong>Soundtrack for Chapter 2<strong>: "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol

_If I lay here, if I just lay here  
>would you lie with me and just forget the world?<em>

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

I'm still nodding hard when Alfred and I arrive back at his apartment. He has to carry me like a sack of potatoes over one shoulder; when we reach the couch, he flips me right down onto it. "You're lucky I'm too high to feel that," I mutter when my head bounces off the arm. Even slurred and hazy, I gotta be mean to the kid.

"So that's really it then." His flat voice floats down from somewhere above me. I can see his body below the neck, and it's like those old cartoons where you never see the parents' heads, just their blank, inexpressive bodies. In real life the sight is kind of eerie, but I'm too lazy to look up.

"That's really it. You got high."

"Now you're pissed at me, and I know why, yeah. 'Cause I got high, 'cause I got high, 'cause I got—"

"Stop singing," he snaps, and it cuts a little of the fog away. I'm shaking.

"Can I get a blanket?"

His body stays perfectly, ominously still for a few more seconds. The suspense—am I going to get what I asked for?—makes me feel like a little kid. He feels like God. Finally his body exits my line of sight, and I can hear it rummaging around in the hall closet.

"Here."

A blue comforter lands over my face with a soft whump. I push it under my chin and try to look him contritely in the eye. Obviously he's angry at me, and before I can stop it, the apology comes tumbling out.

"I'm sorry." It sounds like a kitten's sneeze, small and squeaky and pitiful. It'll never be enough. I'd need to apologize like a lion for it to mean a thing. Imagine that: king of the jungle bowing his dignified head in sorrow, laying his pride at your feet. But I haven't got any pride or dignity left, else I'd give it all to him in a heartbeat.

"I'm sorry," I repeat, doubling my profitless waste of breath. This is why I stopped talking, isn't it? Nothing useful left for me to say. "I'm sorry."

He bends at the knees, and I can see his face now, sad blue eyes behind square glasses. "It's okay, Matthew," and that's so stupid that I laugh in his face. He glares, and maybe I should stop antagonizing everybody who tries to make me feel better, however dishonestly.

"Where did you put your glasses, anyway?"

"They're in the—uh—shit, they're in the _bathroom._ Of a convenience store. Prob'ly—probably gone by now."

His sad blue eyes take a trip to the ceiling. "We'll have to get you a new pair, then." He's so close and warm. The drug blurs the edge of my vision until he's soft and glowing, diffuse at the edges_._ Is he melting away? Is he leaving? Before I can dissuade it, my hand reaches out to grab his wrist.

"Th-thank you. I mean that."

Concerned, he squeezes my fingers in his. "You're seriously freezing, Matthew. Do you want anything warm to drink? I can bring you some dry clothes. Uh," he blushes, "I can help you change if you need it?"

"No. Just the—just the blanket. Is fine."

"Is not fine. Be right back."

I really want to stay up to see if he means it. Gotta keep my eyes open and make sure he still means it, that he'll really be right back, that he's still saying no when I ask him to leave. I have to stay awake.

* * *

><p>I wake up to the unpleasant realization that an Okay-Saying Monster has broken into the apartment.<p>

An Okay-Saying Monster is one of those obnoxious guys on the phone who's on the receiving end of the conversation (conversations are typically one-sided, I should know), and so all he can contribute are agreements and noises of, "Yeah, I'm listening."

"Okay. Okay. Yeah. Right. Right. Okay."

I bury my head between two couch cushions, too groggy to even make the obvious ostrich simile, hoping to find sleep again. Everything aches and I know what that means.

"Yeah, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, okay. Okay."

Nope, sleep will not be coming back to me. Probably found out about the headache. Sleep is always running away from me and my problems. When I roll over, muscles complain like they've run a marathon. Liars. My groan harmonizes with one of his okays. "I swear to god, if you say 'okay' one more motherfucking time—"

"Oh, he's up! I should go. Yeah, thanks. Bye."

Mercifully, he stays over on his side of the room. Just _imagining_ the color of his eyes is aggravating my headache. "Do you need anything?"

I shake my head. He can't see, but I don't want to talk. I talked so much yesterday. A year-long vow of silence wouldn't make up for it.

"Matthew?" Oh no, he's coming around to this side of the couch. "I got some aspirin, some water…"

"Yes," I try. "Please."

I can almost hear his hopeful smile from underneath the cushions. What a sweetheart.

* * *

><p>Whoever was on the phone with him must have said that, since I'd only slipped up the once and wasn't in the middle of a balls-out relapse, I wouldn't have to go to the hospital to ride out the withdrawal. A lot of addicts can die from dehydration and things like that, but I'm just going to have to deal with a souped-up hangover.<p>

Alfred is surprisingly sympathetic.

"Shhh, it's gonna be okay," he murmurs, running his hand down my back in the bathroom. "Shhh."

Shhh? I want to say. What do you want me to do, puke more quietly? But I can't say that because I'm, you know, in the middle of puking.

He lets me lean on him while I shuffle between the living room and the toilet. I'd tell him to stop babying me, except the one time I tried walking on my own saw me smacking against the walls like a ping-pong ball.

The shakes are worse than I'd expect coming down from just one little high, but I guess hunger and the unseasonable cold have made me weak.

A dead fish has more life than me, flopped down on this couch. Don't have enough energy to sit up straight or draw the blankets around myself. Alfred sits beside me like the buildings behind the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the ones that show by comparison just how fucked up Pisa is.

"Do you want anything to eat?"

Shake my head.

"Hey, Matt." I open my eyes to see him peering down at me, curious and expectant. "Are you ever gonna talk to me again? Because it was pretty…pretty cool to hear your voice. Except you were high and then morning-sleepy, and not making sense. Is that the only reason you were talking to me?"

Shake my head no.

"Wait, what does that mean? If the answer is no, then…" An expectant stare. "Why can't you just say it?" His eyes narrow. "Are you fucking with me?"

Ha! How does he like it? Now his penchant for asking ambiguous questions has blown up in his face. Despite my enduring discomfort, a smile sneaks onto my mouth. I nod.

"So you're fucking with me."

"Yes, Alfred. I'm fucking with you."

The muscles around his eyes go slack, and the rest of him goes very still. "Matthew," he says.

The way he says my name is so raw, like rough hands on the back of my neck, bright like a firework going off in a cave. More uncomfortable than thrilling. God, I _hate_ this kind of intensity. I wish he would just stop giving a fuck about me. It would make giving up on myself a lot easier.

"Your voice isn't that different," he says, blinking rapidfast. "I—I don't think. Maybe a little deeper. Rougher."

His broken voice is contagious. There's a lump in my throat the size of the moon.

After that it stays quiet. I shiver in my sweat-damp undershirt. Alfred piles blankets on me, brings the space heater over, gives me soup that won't stay in my system for very long—nothing helps. He offers to distract me with a movie, but the lights and sounds are torture for my head. I try to take a nap, but my muscles ache and complain.

"This is why we can't have nice things," I mutter, close to frustrated tears. Of anger. And frustration. Not pitifulness.

Alfred pulls my head into his lap. "Oh, Matthew."

* * *

><p>I can't sleep at all, racked with cramps and sweating and a nasty headache. It's just not<em> fair<em>, I want to scream at the ceiling. Make it _stop_. I just want to fucking _sleep. _Which god do I have to sacrifice to for a little peace? How hard would I have to bash my head against this desk to fall unconscious? Would there be blood? Would this headache be worse when I woke up?

There's no distraction from the shivering, rotten feeling that buzzes underneath my skin like pins and needles. An hour passes, except it's only been fifteen minutes. I'm eight again and sick with the flu, trapped in an endless night of disoriented suffering.

Alfred starts moving around at five-thirty, and I stay hidden in my bedroom. On the one hand I want to ask him for a glass of water, but on the other I'd rather just let him go away so I can handle it on my own. Some things never change.

When the apartment has been silent for half an hour, and gray dawn light paints my blue blankets into the shade of the sea, I haul myself out of bed. Down the hall toward the bathroom—it's about time I showered and brushed my teeth. Taking a quick inventory on the way there: muscles still ache, head still hurts, eyes hot and feverish. The nausea has faded somewhat, which is nice, until I start coughing into my blanket.

Coughing? I cling to the bathroom doorknob. That's not usually a withdrawal thing.

And then the tiled floor is flying up to meet my face.

* * *

><p>"Seriously, Matthew? You decide to get sick <em>now <em>of all times?"

I actually didn't decide anything, not that Alfred is in any state to listen to reason. He paces behind the couch, back and forth, antsier than me in my worst case of itchy blood. Occasionally he'll lean over to feel my burning forehead.

"I've been thinking about calling up Dr. Kirkland again. Maybe I should take you to the hospital."

"Hell no."

His mouth twitches, and I can tell he's fighting a smile. It really does make him happy to hear me talk, unfortunate circumstances aside.

"But, but yesterday you were throwing up _so _much. I don't know if your body can really handle being sick right now, you know?" He stares at me expectantly. "What do you think?"

I don't know.

"Dude, don't just shrug at me." He grinds his teeth and patters his fingertips on the couch arm. "It's about time for you to take some interest in your own wellbeing, you know?"

It occurs to me that I haven't had to make very many decisions since I started living with Alfred. It's been nice. It's been like being a kid again.

Maybe it's about time I grew up.

"Hospital's stupid. I'll stay here."

"Okay. Are you sure? No, pretend I didn't ask that." He deflates, puffed-up Mama Bear deprived of her fight. His unceremonious collapse on the couch jars my shoulder. With a sigh, he buries his nose into my neck.

"You're gonna catch my cold," I warn congestedly.

"Naw, man, you got that from staying out in the rain."

"It's a myth that coldness and wetness cause sickness. Well, it can _aggravate_ illnesses, but it doesn't actually _cause _them. 'Cause it's a virus that causes the common cold, usually the rhinovirus. Spread because people stay inside and too close to each other in the winter."

"Yeah yeah _okay, _you big know-it-all." I can hear the smile in his mouth as he lifts my blanket and covers his right half. He snuggles into my side and I smother the coughing fits as best I can.

* * *

><p>"Lunchtime!"<p>

"Nuhhhhhh…"

"Yuhhhhhh…C'mon, I made tomato-and-onion soup." The blanket covering my eyes is suddenly gone; sunlight turns the inside of my eyelids bright red. "There's cheese on top," he wheedles, manhandling me into a sitting position. "I even bought some not-stale Saltines." He knocks my hands away before I can rub at my crusty eyes.

He's probably got some kind of freaky doctoring/mothering fetish. Maybe he has Münchausen-by-proxy, and as soon as I start getting better he'll poison all this food he's making for me. Maybe he'll lock me in a basement and bring more meals than I can eat and cuddle with me in his own quilts and it'll still be more than I deserve, I'll still be saying sorry and thank you and—

And it's lucky that he can't read my thoughts, because I'm probably the weirdest ingrate on earth.

The noon-bright kitchen is too loud for my poor head: the refrigerator hums, the fan clicks, the linoleum creaks. Even the soup is a loud shade of red. "Voila! Bon appetit! Hon hon hon!" He smiles like he thinks he's funny.

I don't like onions. I'm not even _hungry_. And he doesn't owe me a damn thing. Why is he doing things for me, why can't he leave me alone, oh my _god._

"Matthew? Everything okay?" He's standing above me, watching expectantly. He keeps doing that, he keeps expecting things from me. I'm so fucking sick of it. What can I say? What can I do? I try a few spoonfuls, and he sits at the table.

"Hey. What's up?" I can't meet his eyes.

"Jesus, I know you're out of practice, Matthew, but will you just fucking _say _something?"

I open my mouth, consider my words. "I don't deserve…everything that you're giving me. I just don't, Alfred." Gosh, this table-top is interesting. So very captivating. I suspect that Alfred's eyes are on my face, but hopefully if I don't look at him it won't be true.

"So what, you're just going to let yourself starve to death? Don't be stupid."

"I'll just…take exactly what I need. No more. I don't want you to give me any more than that."

"You can't spend your whole life running on fumes, Matthew."

That makes me angry enough to spit. "Watch me."

Because what choice do I have? I really wish that somebody had told me that a long time ago. I tried already. I failed already. Insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But running on fumes is perpetuitive—that's the whole point of it—there isn't any chance for me to start living better now. I have to keep running as hard as I can just to stay in the same place.

Alfred stares at me some more. "You take yourself too seriously, Matthew."

_That_ makes me angry enough to stay quiet.

"Really though, please eat something? I want you to get better."

"Actually, I don't like onions."

He stares at me for a few seconds, and I wait for him to dash the scalding soup in my face.

"Well why didn't you fucking _say _so?"

His mouth can't decide whether to turn upwards or downwards; he's caught halfway between incredulous amusement and outrage.

"It wasn't that simple."

"Yes it is! Stop glaring at me like that. It really is that simple. God, Matthew, this is the story of your whole fucking life, isn't it? Making everything a hundred thousand times harder than it has to be." He smiles a little desperately at the ceiling, a hard-eyed _what did I do to deserve this _sort of look. "I can't read minds, unfortunately. You have to actually tell me these things."

How the hell am I supposed to respond to that? Especially to his summation of my life thus far. It wasn't fair for him to say that, it wasn't right. Way below the belt, Alfred.

"There's some vegetable soup—_sans onions_—in the pantry, if you want some. I can come make it in a sec if you want me to, but first I have to call my fr—well, my, uh, boyfriend."

"I can do it myself."

"Call my boyfriend?"

"No, shithead. Make the soup."

"Oh. Well. That makes more sense, I guess."

He seems to be procrastinating on making that call, and I can't help but wonder what's up. "He's gonna yell at me," Alfred explains, able to read my mind despite his recent claims to the contrary. "I don't want to get yelled at. But I guess I need to explain myself…ugh."

Imagine that: loving someone, and having the courage to do something about it.

* * *

><p>The walls in this apartment are a lot thinner than Alfred must realize. Our bedrooms are directly across the hall from one another, so that the doors would touch if we opened them at the same time. I never realized how well this apartment carries sound.<p>

"You're not listening to me. He's like my best friend from high school—no, that isn't even…you're being irrational. Yes you are! It's not like—"

If I were a better person, I might try to block out the conversation, or leave my room. But I'm not, I'm a shameless eavesdropper, so I press my ear against the door while Alfred's boyfriend chews him out over the phone.

"Like I said, he's been really sick these past couple nights, and I needed to look out for him." A long pause. "Well, Jesus, I'm sorry for putting a, a life-and-death…_situation _before our _stupid _date!"

Luckily he's in another room, or else he would've seen me wince at that. Oh, Alfred. No.

"Well," and now it's sheepish, "I can't, actually. I'm taking an extra shift to make up for the one I missed Tuesday—but what was I supposed to do? Let him wallow in delirium and vomit while I made a few bucks at the coffeeshop?"

It occurs to me that Alfred sacrifices a lot without whining about it to my face. And he doesn't refuse to talk to me for it, either. How the hell did everybody around here get so fucking mature? And why didn't I?

"Yeah, I get that. I'm sorry." His tone softens, gets quiet and sweet. I can't hear what he's saying anymore, and honestly that's for the best. My guts are already so twisted up in hopeless anger and want; any more jealousy would likely induce a hernia.

Why doesn't he talk to me like that?

"Okay. Look, I really am sorry. Just..._phoooo…_stressed." I can hear him pattering around, messing with things on his desk, fidgeting. He's always been a fidgeter. "You too. Bye."

He hangs up, and the fidgeting stops. I wonder what he thinks about when he's alone.

* * *

><p>Something's on the news, something dramatic happening in another country, and Alfred is concerned like he personally has to do something about it. I try to stay up and keep watch with him, but I fall into a dream about being strangled, being smothered, being drowned. People are standing right there, watching. They don't know. They don't realize that I'm in danger. They just watch, while I choke, and I try to scream, to say something, please <em>help<em>—

I wake up on the damned couch again, propped up against Alfred's side. He's turned the TV off. There's a book in his lap and a blanket over his shoulders. He told me yesterday that he's got the new Stephen King novel, and it's about JFK and time travel. Two of his most favorite things. Good old Alfred. I notice for the first time that he wears bifocals now—how ridiculous! Twenty-four and wearing bifocals.

He looks down from his book and notices that I'm awake. "You okay, Matt? Were you dreaming? You looked a little worried. You didn't make any sounds, though, so…"

The memory of the nightmare twists through me, but what was scarier than the dream itself is that it felt awfully familiar. The slow crawling horror of a lifetime of silence.

"I can talk," I say experimentally.

"Yes you can," Alfred agrees, and he smiles at me.

* * *

><p><em>I don't quite know<br>how to say  
>how I feel<em>


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes: **Some Austria/Hungary, though you guys should know I prefer Prussia/Hungary. But Prussia is currently kicking ass and taking names in New Haven, so they haven't really met. Also, there are only three chapters left to this story! I know, crazy.

* * *

><p><strong>Soundtrack for Chapter 9<strong>: "To the Dogs or Whoever" by Josh Ritter

_I was flat on my back with my feet in the thorns  
>I was in between the apples and the chloroform<br>She came to me often, I was sure I was dying  
>It was always hard to tell if she was laughing or crying.<em>

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

**Therapist, Take One**

"Shall we talk about your parents, Matthew?"

I stood up and tried to walk out of the room. There was a suspiciously bulky nurse standing guard by the door, and he made a little twirly "turn around" motion at me. I returned a stiff finger, but obeyed all the same.

"Matthew," he said as I settled back into the chair. "Are you going to say anything?"

I hadn't for the entire week I'd been in the psych ward, and I was starting to get a reputation. This was my first visit to the shrink's office, though he'd come by to talk to me a few times in my hospital bed. Gold-something was his name, Goldman? Goldberg?, and he had this nasty-ass moustache that looked like a pencil smudge under his nose. His eyes were wide and blank when he smiled.

"You see, at this point we therapists like to invoke a term called 'personal responsibility.' Do you know what that means?" I gave no indication either way. I was trying to tune him out, and I didn't care an ounce what he thought of me. In retrospect, of course, it's annoying as shit that he came out of there thinking I was stupid. I guess that's the difference between being mute for a reason and mute out of petulance: sincerely not giving a damn versus really not wanting to admit it.

"Personal responsibility means holding yourself accountable for the choices you make and the consequences they have. On a scale from one to ten, how much personal responsibility do you think you possess?"

I stared at him blankly. Well-off drug addicts get dragged off to bullshit hospital rehab programs like this. My less privileged counterparts get dragged off to jail. They'll spend the night and then they'll be thrown back out on the street. Maybe they'll end up in a hospital eventually, the way I did, and then get discharged to the street when they're stable enough for it to be legal. That used to happen to me, until a long-lost friend fell from the sky and offered to pay my hospital bills. No wonder I was so shell-shocked. No wonder I wouldn't talk to anyone.

"Interesting," he said, as though I'd spoken. "Ask yourself this, Matthew: when you think about how your life has turned out, who do you blame? Who do you think was in control? Your parents? The people you knew? The drugs?"

Nobody was "in control." That implies order. That implies that there was a reason things happened the way they did, like somebody or something meant it to. I resent that. I resent the implications.

"Or do you admit that you had some? Even just a little?"

But back then I didn't answer or argue, even in my head. I stared at his ugly moustache and waited for time to pass.

He requested that I be sent to another therapist just three weeks later, one who was better suited to my "special needs."

* * *

><p><strong>Therapist, Take Two<strong>

"I think you must have a lot of self-hatred built up."

Her name was Alex, and she liked for me to call her that because "Dr. Pittman" was both ugly and too formal. "We're equals," she liked to say, "since we're practically the same age," but what kid with a broken brain wants to hear that from the one who's supposed to fix it? Did she want us to be friends? Is that some kind of healing magic, having friends? Because if so, I'd rather not pay a hundred dollars an hour for it.

She had this jar of marbles on her desk. I remember being vaguely curious about them. I remember that that was the first time I really thought about breaking my silence: _Why the fuck do you have that jar of marbles just sitting on your desk? Are they supposed to be decorative? Whimsical? Seriously._

"Did you hear that, Matthew?"

A pause, like she thought I might finally say something. I don't know why these people…whatever.

"You've probably done a lot of things you're not proud of to get the drugs. Your blood panel came back positive for both chlamydia and syphilis."

All I could think was, _Thank god it isn't incurable like AIDS or herpes_. Well, no, not just then no. Maybe in a few months, when I could muster the energy for relief.

"Is that why you tried to kill yourself? Because you hated everything that you'd done? The person you'd become?"

Me:

I scratched restlessly at the bandages over my wrist. Forty-two stitches. She was the first one to dare mention the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ thing.

"Because that wasn't you, Matthew." She leaned over her desk to clasp my hand. Her expression was so painfully earnest. "That wasn't you. That was the drugs. They ruled your life. They made you do all those things. Don't hate yourself. Hate the drugs."

I think my silence must have pissed her off, because she brought up something that every therapist who's ever spoken to me for thirty seconds knows is a soft spot: "Okay, how about this. On your cell, you still have a "Home" number. If I called that, who would pick up?"

And if I spilled your jar of marbles all over the fucking floor, who would pick _them_ up?

Answer: not me.

* * *

><p><strong>Therapist, Take Three<strong>

"You should know, Matthew, that your reputation precedes you. I'm not in the habit of gossiping, nor am I usually inclined to pester the poor souls who happen to be the subject, but in this case I feel that there's no real reason to skirt the issue. Your previous therapists have informed me that you are uncooperative and generally ill-tempered, able to speak but unwilling, aware of your surroundings but only indirectly responsive." He tapped his pen on the sleek black desk, waiting either for dramatic effect or for me to respond. "So basically you won't talk because you don't feel like it."

I looked around at his office: no family portraits or personal shit like that. Just clocks and staplers and sticky notes, just practical things, and I could respect that. A guy who knows he's at work and isn't afraid to show it. Straightforward and unpatronizing.

"I'd like to know why."

He kind of left pauses there for me to speak, but not to an obnoxious degree. Just a short little skip in the conversation, which he quickly and fluidly ended with his next sentence. Not like he was embarrassed of the fact that I wasn't talking, or trying to cover it up. Just being efficient.

"You're an adult, and though you aren't really in a position to make your own medical decisions, nobody can make you talk. So I won't waste my time trying to pressure you into it." Ooh, reverse psychology. I was a little impressed despite myself. "Maybe this is a way for you to feel like you have a little control in your life. Your friend Alfred is making all of your medical decisions—he's the reason you're stuck with me—" I couldn't decide if his candidness was a gimmick to make me like him more, or an honest stab at the truth. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and like him a little more. "—and he's also paying your bills, taking care of insurance…maybe you're feeling sick of getting handled like a kid."

Then came the part with the wild conjectures, which not even my favorite therapist to date was immune to.

"Maybe you resent him for helping you—after all, you never asked for his help. And here he is, forcing you to be in his debt. Being in debt is a dangerous thing on the street, isn't it?" He had no idea. "Who can blame a guy for wanting a little control in his life."

I studied my hospital bracelet more thoroughly than ever to show what I thought of that theory.

But still he continued. "Control is something that a drug addict has in short supply, isn't it? You can't stop, even when you try. You do things you never would have before just to get money. It's almost like you don't have a choice." I _didn't, _I thought. I didn't have a choice. "And so maybe the one thing you could control was your heartbeat. Maybe it felt like the only thing left to do was end it."

He gave me more credit than I deserved. I wasn't thinking, I wasn't being calm and methodical and purposeful when I took that razorblade to my wrist. I was just fucking tired. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Nobody really likes to acknowledge how deeply our lives are shaped by throwaway, spur-of-the-moment decisions.

"And now here you are, more trapped than ever. The hospital tells you when to eat, when to sleep, when to shit." His "brutal honesty" was definitely a gimmick. I began to resent it. "And that probably pisses you off. It pisses me off for you. So I want to give you a chance for a little control back. Ever heard of outpatient therapy?"

I resented his British accent, too, and his enormous caterpillar eyebrows. Most of all, I resented the fact that he was trying to trick me into thinking that he was letting me out of the cage, when really I know that the cage is everywhere I go.

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

The air is warm and smells like wet dust, the city street after a warm summer rain. Alfred's been calling it a "schizophrenic September," because the weather can't decide if it ought to be autumn-cold or summer-hot. I think they call it an Indian Summer, not that people in this city have any reason to know the meaning of the term. I remember the winters in Connecticut, when a warm day was twenty degrees. And the springtime heat waves that could get up to ninety, and none of the dorms had air conditioning.

I miss the extremes a little bit.

Ivan still has some of my coats.

I light up another cigarette with the dying end of this one, even though I know I ought to be rationing these suckers. Alfred isn't an idiot; he's probably seen the butts scattered around the fire escape, and he can probably smell the smoke on my clothes. But he hasn't mentioned it yet, so neither will I.

There's a crunching, grating sound, and the door to the escape one floor up squeals open.

"Shit fuck Jesus fucking—oh, hey there Matthew, didn't see you."

It's Dr. Hedervary, barefoot and wearing a man's shirt that nearly reaches her knees. "Well, this is awkward." She trips down the steps to my landing, clutching to her chest a pile of clothes and a pair of heels.

"Really?" I have to ask, and she stops in her tracks with a startled look. "Roderich? The guy who wakes me up at four in the morning with Chopin?"

"I didn't know you were talking again," she replies softly, adjusting her grip on the shoes. There's an awkward moment of silence where I can feel her staring at the slice of face she can see. "Hey, scoot over. I got a quarter in this skirt pocket, if I can bum a smoke?"

I give her the _aren't you a doctor? _eyebrow.

"Yeah, I know what you're thinking. I figure I've got, like, lung cancer privileges or something because I see it all the time."

Even though it's getting her (Roderich's?) shirt all wet and dirty, she sits down next to me and lets her feet dangle over the edge. Her vowels are bitten wide by the cigarette in her mouth as she says, "Listen, I wanna ask a favor of you. It's kinda dumb, but I can't get Rod to help me and I don't really have a lot of men in my life right now." She takes a short and graceful drag, careful to blow the smoke away from me.

I nod in encouragement.

"Okay, I'm selling my car back to the guy I bought it from. He's a real jerkwad, though, tried to cheat me when I bought it. Luckily my dad was there to straighten him out. He's, you know, he's the kind of chauvinistic asshole who thinks that a girl won't know she's getting screwed over. I _did,_ but it wasn't until I brought in a beefy dude that he would back down."

"Assholes." I know this game, the Matthew's-one-of-the-girls game where I listen to grievances and agree that men suck at the end. "They're like, 'It's got boobs. Gotta screw it somehow.'"

She laughs, a little startled, still not quite used to my voice. "I know, right? So I was wondering if maybe you wouldn't mind coming with me to get it appraised."

"_Me?_ I don't really know much about cars."

"What?"

"I said," I say, feeling almost guilty for speaking louder than a mumble, like there's a finite amount of volume in the world and I'm wasting it, "that I don't know anything about cars."

Liz shrugs. "That's okay. I do. You just have to stand there, look threatening, and back up whatever I say."

"Threatening?"

"Oh, don't get all skeptical on me. Yeah, you're skinny, no offense, but you've still got that hard, mean, thousand-yard crackhead stare. No offense."

I flinch and then force a chuckle so she knows I didn't mean to be offended. "When?"

"Whenever you're free."

"Every day except Tuesday," I sigh, taking a long drag. I really need to fix that. I need to get a job.

"I'll make an appointment next time I have a day off. Got the graveyard shift tonight."

I smile, because that's how we met. She smiles back, and I think she gets it.

* * *

><p>Tuesday I notice that I've gone up a belt-notch—looks like some of my weight is finally coming back. I don't know how to feel about it. I guess I ought to ride that bicycle Alfred found for me; I don't want to gain back those twenty pounds in fat.<p>

It's hard finding a clean shirt. Alfred and I need to do laundry soon. Sometimes it seems like a waste getting dressed at all, with the way you just take it all off at the end of the day.

"Do you want to eat before we go, or on the way home?" Alfred's jerking his own shirt on over his head, knocking his glasses askew. He never had the sense to take them off for things like this, even though it ends up causing him more inconvenience.

Just like that, high school nostalgia punches me in the chest hard enough to steal my breath. Sleeping over at his house after watching horror movies. Him sneaking out to mine when his dad pissed him off. Changing in front of each other, just a couple of pretty high school boys, friends. I remember the night we got into an argument about his grades or the fact that I cared too much about them, only it was too late for me to drive home. I went to sleep on the floor of his living room, uncomfortable and fuming because _what a jackass_. And then he came down a few minutes later and just lay down on the floor with me, saying, "I thought you might get cold," only instead of inviting me back to his room we just slept on the floor like that.

I'm getting ready to drown in that old black lake of Where Did I Go Wrong, but Alfred cuts in. "Or we could just wing it. See what we feel like later."

"You have to plan the good things in life," I tell him. "Like lunch."

He grins at me, lopsided, and my stomach does a dumb little flip.

* * *

><p>Dr. Kirkland comes out to greet me personally when it's my appointment time, and it confuses me for a minute before I remember that he still doesn't know.<p>

He catches my eye briefly before turning to Alfred. "Mr. Jones, I think it's best if you tell me everything you know about what happened with Matthew last week so I can—"

"You can stop acting like he's my ventriloquist dummy."

He starts a little and turns back to me.

"Oh."

I was expecting shock and celebration, you know, a big ole pat on the back. He's just gonna "oh" me?

"Well, come along then."

His office seems smaller than usual, the way everything is bigger when you're young, or sitting down. I'm not just sitting down anymore. At least I'm talking, instead of just letting things happen and watching them unfold. That's gotta count somehow, right? I feel bigger and the room looks smaller. I say something out loud to prove it: "I've always really hated this wallpaper."

Arthur nods distractedly. He looks unsettled, and I mention it.

He takes his seat, shaking his head. "No, it's just…your voice…"

He doesn't elaborate. "What's wrong with my voice?"

"Nothing's _wrong _with it. It's just not what I was expecting."

"My thoughts exactly, circa age seventeen. Puberty is never what you expect."

His lips twitch. "You're a funny guy, Matthew."

I don't know how to respond, so I don't.

"So, would you like to tell me why you started talking again?"

I know the answer to this one. "No."

"Well," he sighs. "It wouldn't be Tuesday without an uncooperative Matthew."

And I have to laugh about that.

"I'm really glad that you've decided to use your voice again."

I tell him don't speak too soon.

"Matthew. In all seriousness. This is really good for you, okay? It means that we've made some progress here." He thinks I'm talking because "_we_ made progress"? Okay, sure, take all the credit. It's not like the real reason is that I relapsed, spoke to Alfred under the influence, and then decided a silence isn't worth much broken. "More importantly, it means that we're going to have the chance to make even more progress. And faster."

Yeah, about exponential growth: how things like new technologies make it possible to invent more new technologies, and "faster than ever before"? I don't know if I like the idea of getting better that fast, going and going and going forward, like trying to run up the side of a cliff. Asymptotically approaching that magical land of "things are okay." Asymptotic means you never get to touch it, though.

Math wasn't really my thing in school, of course, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe it's completely inapplicable. Maybe everything I've ever learned, it's all just facts floating around in my head. Maybe there's something wrong with me that I can't make connections and actually use what I know. Because look at me: having the best grades and knowing the most things of everyone I knew didn't save me from any damn thing. So what are they worth? Facts and grades and all that shit.

Dr. Kirkland's response to these musings is, "Welcome to the world of academia."

What's the point? Why did I ever think it was worth it to waste my life on thinking too hard about things that don't matter? Not that drugs ended up being better for me. But it certainly put things in perspective. Who cares, basically.

He shrugs and says, "Intellectualism has its uses. But let's talk about _you_ now."

I'd rather talk about the nature of progress and the questionable purpose of trying to do anything, but I guess it would be counterproductive anyway.

"Alfred called me last weekend to ask if he ought to take you to the hospital after your relapse. Do you want to talk about that?"

"I was angry and I had twenty bucks. Wasn't much to it."

"Why were you angry?"

"Alfred pissed me off."

"How'd he do that?"

"How's that any of your business?"

"Matthew." Dr. Kirkland gives me a "you're smarter than this" look. "Alfred pays me to pry into your personal life."

"Why the fuck is he doing that, anyway? No offense, Dr. K, but this is kind of a scam."

He shrugs. "You get back what you put into it. Maybe we should let last weekend lie, at least for now. Is there anything you want to tell me about yourself? About how you got to this point in life? Remember, the only things I know are what your hospital records say and what Alfred has told me about your past."

I am completely flummoxed by the concept of a starting point. I could keep it short and sweet, just mention the things that he's bound to know anyway: homelessness, prostitution, addiction. I don't know if I want to talk about Ivan, because that would open a whole new can of worms—sexual abuse therapy seems like it would be a lot different from therapy for depression and addiction, and I think I've managed to find a shaky equilibrium with what I've got. Equilibrium is the death of progress, but I mean at least it's _comfortable_.

"Why don't we talk about why you dropped out of Yale first? Which came first, the drugs or the decision to leave?"

"Ha, _decision _to leave."

After that he stays quiet, staring at me with hard green eyes. If he's waiting for me to talk first to break the tension, he'll be waiting a couple months. The past dozen weeks of my life were one long, unbroken string of tension, and I spent all my time cultivating it, twanging it. My feet know this dance better than his.

"So then why did you start doing drugs? Were your friends doing them? Did you need them to keep up with your course load?"

How to answer this one without being honest enough to cause problems? "My roommate."

"Hm." He stares at me. "Something tells me that your drug habit was not a matter of peer pressure. You don't seem like the kind of guy to fall prey to mob mentality, am I right?"

"You'd be surprised," I say, annoyed by his presumption mostly because I like to think that he's right. But everybody wants to think that, every single person on earth wants to be different, and that's what makes them all exactly the same.

"Describe the situation in which you first used illegal drugs. Which drugs? Who was present?"

"Is this a fucking Gallup poll or what?"

"You want me to ask how it made you feel?"

"You're going to anyway."

"True. It's an important question."

But I can't. I really can't. So I don't talk about that. "Alfred has a boyfriend."

Dr. Kirkland's head tilts, and he looks curious despite what ought to be his better judgment. "_Alfred's_ gay?"

"I know, I was the same way when I found out. My gaydar didn't go off at all, and I used to make a living off my gaydar."

It's a funny comment that deserves a laugh, but Dr. Kirkland looks uncomfortable. Homophobes and intolerants of any kind don't typically get too far in his profession, so I assume it's just that he doesn't do gallows humor. He hasn't been anywhere near a gallows, obviously. The funniest people I know are soldiers and victims.

Or maybe it's just that I've been there, so I get how it's funny.

"Okay, well. Since you brought it up. Why don't you describe your relationship with Alfred?"

"Stupid."

"Matthew. That is not a valid description."

I stare at my hands, personally aware that it is a one-hundred percent valid description. Where do I start with my relationship with Alfred? Do I talk about the unrequited crush that's been going on since high school? The fact that Alfred is a glorious and radiant human being and I halfway want to have him and halfway want to be him? Should I talk about how petty he is, how insensitive he can be? How self-absorbed he gets, and how detrimental that was? I could repeat to him word-for-word the voicemails I left on Alfred's phone, and describe the exact combination of confusion and pity on his face when I knocked on his door that day, begging for help. How he closed it gently, so gently but that didn't help at all as he told me to ask someone else.

"He's being so good to me to make up for a wrong."

He makes some noise, asking me to elaborate or something, but I have to say this, so I say it over him, "I don't deserve it."

"Deserve what?"

"His apology. I don't deserve it."

* * *

><p>"How'd it go?"<p>

I shrug.

"Do you feel any saner?"

Shake my head. Less so, actually. Ready to collapse in my bed and sleep for a day, actually.

"Takeout tonight?"

"Nah." I'm not hungry, and I don't feel like looking at him anymore. I'll beg off, call it a sickness. "Go out with your boyfriend."

"I think he's gonna break up with me soon," Alfred says. I can't figure out what he's thinking, and I don't feel like being a wall for him to bounce his emotions off of. So I don't respond.

* * *

><p>"No, I'm pretty sure the engine is fine. I had it checked a couple thousand miles ago. And I just had it appraised and everything, so—"<p>

"Listen, sweetheart. I've been a mechanic for nineteen years, been sellin' cars for five of 'em. I know what a fair price on an engine is. And I'm telling you that this one is gonna need to be replaced real soon. Got that?"

This is the part where I'm supposed to jump in and intimidate him into being sensible. I don't do growling and muscle-clenching, so I just mutter, "Where I come from, a guy trying to swindle a girl this bad would get shot in the dunce-cap."

He spits on the ground between us, but eventually concedes.

"Feels good to use that voice for something, right?" Liz asks as we leave the lot.

"I don't know," I say, not because it isn't a good thing that I helped Liz, but because she asked me if it _felt _like it. Do I feel good? I really don't know. But I guess I'm ready to try.

* * *

><p><em>Don't pity the bullet, but pity the man<br>Who both find their place in the same sad plan  
>Who both are like the barrel going over the falls<br>Crying all the way down, "I never asked to be involved."_


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes:** Two chapters to go! Yao shows up in this chapter, and she is female. I understand that it's generally agreed that China is a dude in canon, but if you ask me, Hetalia has too many dicks on the dancefloor. So have some fem!Yao.

**Warnings: **Matthew's meds are adjusted, and that always makes for a weird state of mind. Bipolar-type mood swings and some disturbing fantasies of violence ahead.

* * *

><p><strong>Soundtrack for Chapter 10:<strong> "The State that I Am In" by Belle and Sebastian**  
><strong>

_I gave myself to sin_  
><em> I gave myself to providence<em>  
><em>And I've been there and back again<em>

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

Today I go to pick up Alfred from the coffeeshop, and his greeting is, "Guess who's officially single?"

"Want me to throw you a party?"

"Yeah, a party would cheer me up," he says, smiling at the ground. Smiling at the ground is Alfred-code for having Feelings but being "too much of a man" to show them. I don't know who he's trying to fool, because I've seen him crying over shitty horror movies and _Lassie. _So.

I try to convince him that they weren't a very good match anyway.

"Don't even," he says half-heartedly. "You never even met the guy."

"You never talked about him."

"Yeah, so how would you—"

"Because you never talked about him."

Alfred stares hard at the ground and synchs up our steps. Each footfall marks a beat of silence, one more wasted opportunity to understand each other. He finally says, "It's not like I wasn't excited to be dating him or whatever. It just would have been weird. I couldn't talk to him about you, because…well, it's complicated. And I never talked to you because you never talked back."

I nod. Fair enough. I try not to wonder how much I've missed that way.

"So anyway, it's like. The two of you always existed in separate spheres or whatever."

"Was that…tough?"

Was that tough. What a great question, Matthew. You're just such a wonderful friend, wonder why you haven't got more of them. I want to encourage conversation, though! I don't want him to think that I don't care about his feelings. Maybe it came off that way before, when I was using his money and refusing to say a thing, never saying thanks, and Jesus H. Christ I could walk out in front of a bus right now and still feel too good for myself. You know? Better than I deserve.

"I don't know. I guess not. I mean, it sounds really bad, but he was like a break from you and you were like a break from him. That sounds really bad, doesn't it? I'm sorry."

I watch our steps for a while again. Then I tell him that, "Nah, everybody's a shitty person. You don't have to pretend otherwise."

That's probably the difference, though, between shitty people and good people. Shitty people have accepted that it's human nature to be bad, and they rationalize their lack of effort with truths like, "morality is relative anyway." Good people are always reaching for the impossible, never admitting they can't be perfect, never acknowledging those gray areas.

Repenters are looking to get better; sinners just want to be understood.

I shouldn't like to lead Alfred astray. He was always trying to be such a good person in high school, in college, when he slammed that door in my face.

I guess "good" is a relative term.

Alfred sighs. "I am cheered and discouraged. Listen, what were your plans for this afternoon?"

"Plans?"

"Were you gonna stay in the apartment?"

"…I can go somewhere else if you want me to."

"No, I don't want you—never mind," he mutters.

Is he trying to break it to me that he wants me gone today? "You can tell me if you don't want me to be around you right now. I'm a big boy. I can take it."

"It's not about you, Matthew," and he says it with enough vehemence that I know he's under the impression that I think everything's about me. Okay. "I mean, I just. I want to be alone for just a few hours. Just a couple hours to myself. But I don't want to chase you out of the apartment if you were planning on spending the day there."

I offer to go somewhere else.

"No, seriously," and I can't tell if he's exasperated with me or himself or both of us, "if you didn't have any plans—"

"I do. I'll go to a Twelve Step Meeting."

"You'll _what_?"

"Twelve Steps, I said. Don't look at me like that. Maybe I finally have something to say."

He regards me skeptically, but it's true. I finally have something to say.

* * *

><p><strong>Then<strong>

"Yeah, I went to twelve-step meetings and shit. Kinda stupid if you ask me. I only got one life, and I'd rather spend a few years of it high and a little fucked-up than a thousand years bored and miserable." The toothless old man grinned at me, said, "'N' anyway, look at me. They said I shoulda died at twenty-five. And here I am! Thirty! And still goin' at it."

I nodded and burrowed deeper into the grip of my donated coat. Somebody named "James" had written his name on the tag. I wonder if James felt a little warmer that night, wherever he was.

"That other life wasn't for me, you know? Workin' to get money to have a house and a poor wife and a couple kids who never asked to live, and me, stickin' them on the conveyor belt as soon as they born."

"The conveyor belt."

"Yeah, man. The whole world is the conveyor belt. We jumped off. Them twelve steps is trying to stick us back on, but me, I'm glad I jumped off."

I nodded again and thought to myself that it must have been a very great fall.

* * *

><p><strong>Now<strong>

"That's the worst advice I've ever fucking heard."

This is only the second thing I've ever said at a Twelve Step meeting, a few minutes after "Perhaps hell might like to freeze over first." That one was in response to the group leader's question: "Matthew, since you're new, perhaps you'd like to share your story with us?"

Luckily this isn't some auditorium session, like you get at the really big community centers. Not a whole lot of people go to the weekday meetings, as far as I can tell. If the case were otherwise, I'd probably be stuck to the floor in a pile of hateful goop with the way everybody's staring at me.

But this is just a little church reception hall with twenty seats and no stage. "Does this mean you're ready to speak, Matthew?" The woman who'd been talking about "letting Jesus take the wheel" now regards me with feigned curiosity.

"Sure," I say, drawing strength from that peculiar state of mind where you've gotten yourself into something but it's all moving too fast to sit back and freak out. Maybe there's some kind of equation for it, mind sub don't-give-a-fuck equals the weight of the situation times conversational velocity, which, on second thought, equals momentum, and I guess that makes sense. The momentum of the situation prevents me from giving a fuck, so I go up to the front of the room, all eyes tailing me like hunting hounds.

The church reception hall looks a lot bigger facing the other way. I address the clock up near the ceiling, thinking of the chalkboard I gave to Alfred. "I'm Matthew"—"Hi, Matthew"—"and I've been sober for like a week. Before that I had a four-month streak going for me, but I slipped up."

"It happens," I am roundly informed.

"Um." I try not to meet anyone's eyes as I climb onto my soapbox. "Admitting that you have a problem is the first step to getting better. Obviously. But the second step in this dumbass program is the most counterproductive, self-exonerating, enabling piece of bull—"

"Matthew, please don't be disrespectful."

"Okay, but think about it. How is anybody supposed to _try_ if they think everything's out of their hands? Leaving all your responsibility at some god's feet isn't any kind of solution. Calling yourself powerless, that's just a cop-out. We can always do more. We can always try harder. Saying otherwise is an excuse to give up."

The people shift in their seats, twitchy under the weight of a questioned dogma. The Twelve Steps are sacred. The world thinks they're bulletproof because it allows for infinite interpretations of "a higher power," like that's the only point of contention in the whole thing.

"Anybody have something to say to that?"

A woman close to the front, heavily pierced with beautiful eyes, says, "I get what you mean. If we let ourselves stop trying…that's a bad thing. Trying to leave everything up to a higher power. Because then we get lazy and complacent. Because we think God's the one in charge, so we don't do anything. We stop being _proactive._"

"Getting over addiction ain't a matter of willpower," someone disagrees. "That shit's not enough."

"Yeah, but if you try to say that _everything _is in God's hands, then you won't do anything for yourself. You gotta, like, meet halfway."

"I don't think that anybody here is denying that it takes some work," the leader segues smoothly, stepping up to the front again. "Since you're up here, Matthew, why don't you tell us about yourself? Maybe talk about how you came to that conclusion."

"No, I—"

"C'mon, Matthew," encourage my fellow addicts. They want me to talk about myself. It's always a tricky thing to give your life story at a meeting like this. I can't pull off the charming self-deprecator—I am too genuinely sick of myself to seem anything but sullen and bitter, and so my audience will likely feel the same towards me. Going for the stoic hero isn't really my bit either—it's total bullshit and takes too much effort. I am many things, but selfless isn't one of them.

So I go with serious straight-talk. I wish I were funny. I wish I were noble. "I was in school. My roommate got me hooked on heroin and meth. I came back to the west coast to try to get clean, but it didn't work out. I did what most people here did to get money. I'm not special, I'm not proud of it, I'm just. Taking it as it comes right now."

This introduction is met with encouragement and applause. _Taking it as it comes. _Platitudes always get clapping, head-nodding, and amen-ing. Personally I want to wash my mouth out.

The rest of the meeting passes in a blur of banalities and suppressed irritation. The group leader congratulates us all on our self-awareness (evident in the fact that we showed up to a meeting), and suggests that we mingle a bit amongst ourselves. The woman who agreed with my dumbass rant (why did I do that again?) approaches me.

"Matthew, right? I'm Yao."

"Hi, Yao." I'm trying to mock the AA-style introductions, but I'm pretty sure it goes over her head. Story of my life.

"I really liked what you said up there. I always hated that whole 'admit your powerlessness' thing. Isn't that sort of counterproductive?"

"Always thought so myself."

She sits down, drags my stomach down with her. She seems pretty cool, but on the other hand: social interaction. I'm woefully out of practice. I pretend to not be rude and sit down next to her.

"I got into cocaine at university," she says, and immediately there is a fellowship between us. I don't know a whole lot of other college students. And maybe—okay, definitely—it's elitist of me, but I like talking to educated people.

"Did you make it out with a degree?"

"I wish." She sighs and fiddles with an earring. "I've been trying to save up the money to take a few night classes. I have enough credits that I could possibly get a BA in two years. But saving up the money is so hard."

"It's so easy the first time around, getting in. If your parents are there to pay. A lot harder the second time around."

"Yeah," she agrees. "My parents won't accept my calls anymore."

"Yeah."

We don't ask any further questions. That's just rude in a place like this.

"Hey, you should come by more often. I don't get to talk to a whole lot of kids our age, y'know? Most of 'em are either already dead or still in denial. I don't want to be rude, but…" She trails off, gesturing at the trench in my left arm. "Support groups are really stupid, but everybody needs a little support from time to time. This right here is the free kind. And money's always tight, especially if you need pills."

An uncomfortable beat. I'm always very wary about accepting invitations, especially those made in conjunction with an observation of my scars. "I've got somebody who pays for the pills."

"How do they work?"

To be honest, I wouldn't know the difference. I suspect that I feel worse about myself right now than when I was on the streets, simply because I have the luxury. There's something to be said for desperation: lack of self-examination.

I settle on, "Their alleged effectiveness is a polite fiction."

She smiles at me and nods. "Like the Steps?"

I consider this, and then exempt the parts about making amends. Making amends is important.

"Making amends? Shit, son, that'd take the rest of your life."

I know.

* * *

><p>Alfred has been teasing me about Yao for the past week-and-a-half. He has a real knack for making me regret the whole "talking again" thing.<p>

"You met a girl, huh? Maybe you could invite her over for dinner sometime. I'd leave for a while. Heck, you could tell her that this apartment is yours! That would impress her."

I'm not looking to impress her. Maybe if I wanted a relationship with _somebody who has no experience with addiction_, but somebody like her would know I was lying. Or she'd at least know that I had a sugar-daddy, somebody who'd loaned me something to get started. It goes back to the whole reason I can't date Alfred: he knows me too well. As a fellow drug addict, she automatically knows the worst of me. And I can guess the worst of her. That isn't really the foundation for a healthy relationship, now is it?

And there's also the part where I'm gay.

"What's her name? Aw, c'mon Mattie, don't do this silent treatment thing. Haven't you had enough of giving me the silent treatment?"

Well jesus fucking christ, not if you're going to be like this.

"I bet she's pretty. It's always the pretty ones who have fucked-up self-esteem. Right? I mean, just look at you." The part of my brain ruled by a self-conscious sixteen-year-old cheers quietly in the back of my head.

To kill it, I say, "I will lick your boots if it'll get you to shut up."

He peers down at his tennis shoes. "But I'm not wearing—"

"Alfred, I'm _gay._"

He looks up from his lack of boots, then back down as though they might solve his confusion.

"No you're not."

I throw up my hands in defeat, and climb out his bedroom window onto the fire escape.

Sunsets have been coming noticeably sooner these days, burning the sky a clean blue above the mess of orange and pink. I roll out my sleeves and tuck my thumbs into the little holes at the hem—Alfred makes fun of me for it, but I use those little holes to keep a low profile in public. They hide the tracks and that scar that sits on my left arm, a sullen snake-like reminder. Long sleeves remind me of being cozy and warm in the wintertime: sweaters and afternoon naps and dinners taken in the dark. My mother liked to turn on the electric fireplace and light candles even before it got properly cold. She loved winters. I used to, until I spent three of them out on the streets.

What the hell has my life even become? At the age of eighteen, I didn't even know it was _possible _to be this washed-up and pathetic. But I guess I've made a little nest for myself. Rock bottom's a hell of a good foundation. So I snuggle into the hoodie Alfred bought me, smoking and watching the early sunset and wondering when I'll be allowed to wear mittens again.

A few moments later, Alfred joins me.

"I thought I told you to lose that habit."

I take another drag. The cigarette is half-burned down, glowing like a heartbeat every time I take a breath.

"But I guess it's not that big of a deal, as long as you're doing it outside."

He crouches down next to me, kneeing my back, and I'd like to ask him if he's ever made a proper apology in his whole damn life.

I remember how apologetic he was when I first came home with him, back when he was happy to accept all the blame for what happened to me. I miss that a lot, in a perverse sort of way. It's nice to have someone feeling guilty over you, even if guilt is motivated by selfishness—after all, guilt is just a way to make another person's pain all about you. But it felt like being cared about, and it gave me an easy target for my anger.

"Did you really mean what you said earlier?"

"What, about being gay?"

He rolls his eyes, a new habit I like to think he picked up from me. "No, about licking my boots."

"Well, you aren't actually wearing boots."

"Matthew."

I glance to the side and up a bit. His glasses wink the sunset back at me, and its reflection is more impressive than the thing itself.

"Yeah, I'm gay. Do you know how many guys I've had sex with?"

He looks uncomfortable.

"Go on, guess." I wonder about the answer to my own question and conservatively estimate three hundred.

"No thanks."

I try to revel vindictively in the uncomfortable silence that follows, but instead I just regret it. When did being hateful stop being fun?

"Did you mean what _you_ said?" I ask.

"What did I say?"

"That's it's always the pretty ones who have self-esteem issues."

"Well, I don't know if that's true. But most of the ugly people I know are sensible. All the fucked-up people I know are good looking."

I keep waiting for him to come out and say it again, but he doesn't.

"Like me?"

The skin on his cheeks is pink, but I can't tell if it's just the lighting or if he's embarrassed. "Well, I mean. Yeah. You were really good-looking." His use of the past tense offends the little vanity that's left to me. I know I'm too skinny and strung-out looking to be pretty anymore, but still. Ouch.

He seems to realize and overbalances with, "I mean, you're still good-looking! Just, like, in a different way."

"Uh-huh."

"Don't say it like that, _uh-huh. _Don't say it like you've already decided that I don't mean it. Because I do. You used to be hotter, sure"—Alfred the Motivational Speaker strikes again—"and you're still good-looking now…just in a different way. Haunted. Plenty of people would be interested in you."

It stings worse to hear him say it—when people tell you that you're wrong about something you know is true, in that tone of voice like they're making a concession, like, you're not _that _scary-looking. Aw, don't say that, you're pretty. You know, _that _tone of voice. The way Einstein would tell you that you aren't that stupid, Johnny Depp saying that you're hot too, Alfred Jones telling me that I'm datable. He is just the worst possible person to hear it from. And so I tell him with all my heart to shut the fuck up.

"Okay, okay, jeez. You try to compliment a guy."

I take another drag of the cigarette, tugging Alfred's hoodie lower into my lap. Beneath the scratch of my undershirt, little circular scars stipple my ribcage. I have a weird relationship with cigarettes: they've burned me before, sharply and distinctly, and they're hurting me still in a nebulous achy sort of way. But I'll keep smoking them because it doesn't really seem like I have a choice, and god help me I like them.

"You poked holes in that goddamn hoodie? I bought it for you so you'd have a normal one! You freak."

God help me, I like him.

* * *

><p>He doesn't bring up the fact that I'm gay again, which is either extremely kind or reveals his extreme reluctance to discuss romance with me. Maybe on the off-chance it would give me ideas. I've had ideas about him for something like six years, but I'd never consider complicating our relationship further by bringing it up.<p>

Neither of us deserve the clusterfuck that would follow.

And then Kirkland adjusts my mood stabilizers, and I get weird.

Some days I just want to sleep all day, and some days I want to fling shit and shake the bars of my cage, paint the outside like my inside in any way I can. Rage swings into dead sleep, and sleep swings into the ugly morning, bright and empty with Alfred at work. I slide off the edge of the bed only when my bladder demands it, or when Alfred gets back and I don't want him to see me immobile and pathetic, dropped out of the sky, wax wings melted in the heat of rage, broken and exhausted in my bed. I search for coffee some mornings, sometimes making it to the kitchen and sometimes lying on the floor tangled helplessly in my blankets, crying with frustration at the fact that my arms are too heavy to move, it's too much effort, it's too much. Some dead heavy emotion sits on my chest, blunter than sadness. Just _mal,_ just bad, I just feel bad, just tired and done and done and I want it to be _over_.

Energy finds me again in the evening, and I get on the bus or walk the streets, a bundle of skin and bone and nerves nerves nerves. Alfred watches me leave with a suspicious expression, and every day I remind him that I'm completely broke. Some days I manage to sit through a Twelve Step meeting. Usually Yao and I duck out, me kicking the ground every other step in wordless anger. She talks me through it, mellow on the other side, and it pisses me off more. There's a permanent indentation in the tip of my shoe.

One night as we're setting the table for dinner Alfred asks, "How are you feeling?"

"I want to scream," I say, this close to actually doing it.

"Well that's not good," Alfred says.

"WELL THANK YOU FOR YOUR INSIGHT." He stares at the shards of broken glass and lumps of cheesy potatoes on the floor, and I burst into tears and tell him that my new medication sucks.

"I'm sorry," I say.

"It's okay, man. I'll clean it up."

"I'm sorry," I say again, biting down so hard on my fingertips that I worry the nails will crack. Crack, I am cracked. My solution is to punch the table really hard, and he drops the mop to hold my hands, fold my arms over and against my chest.

"Matthew," he murmurs, low and soft against my ear. "Matthew, _stop._"

"I'm sorry," I say against the side of his neck. It's damp with my tears, and I wonder what it'd be like if it was spit instead, if his skin was damp to my kisses. He'd probably still be saying "Matthew, stop. Please stop."

In the morning I wake up too tired to do a thing but breathe and hate myself. I can't even remember what it's like to have the energy to cry, much less smash a glass pot to pieces. Alfred will be home to put his hand on my arm and tell me it's okay, ask me to stop shaking, beg me to feel better.

He's the one who just went through a break-up. He's the one working and paying rent. Where the hell do I get off having these stupid senseless bitch fits? I want him to come home and give me what I deserve, throw me against the wall, smash my head with a lamp, tear the skin from my chest in bloody strips, squeeze my skull until it cracks between his hands.

But instead he comes home with a macchiato from the shop, more whipped cream than coffee, just the way I like it, and he tells me that he called and Dr. Kirkland says my moods should level out by the end of the week, and if they don't he'll fiddle with my dosage and see how that works. I say I hate being a guinea pig and Alfred says "I know," pulls me up from the blankets for a hug. I want to tell him that his kindness is unwelcome. That it's actually the worst cruelty possible to somebody who knows exactly what he deserves.

"I thought I was getting better," I say instead.

"Getting better isn't a straight line," he tells me, and I imagine his teeth on the floor. I hate these stupid fucking platitudes. "Not every day is going to be better than the last."

I wish I could just learn to live with that, but it isn't fair. Today I'm miserable, tomorrow I'll be angry, and if I'm very lucky, in a month I'll just be ashamed, embarrassed enough to hide under the covers forever. There isn't much to look forward to. I listen to Alfred bustling in the kitchen, humming like he's innocent. It isn't fair.

* * *

><p><em>Oh love of mine, would you condescend to help me<em>  
><em> Cause I'm stupid and blind<em>  
><em> Oh and desperation is the Devil's work, it is the folly of a boy's empty mind<em>  
><em> Now I'm feeling dangerous, riding on city buses for a hobby is sad<em>  
><em> Why don't you lead me to a living end<em>


End file.
